Netgear now touting open source WRT-compatible wireless router

[Ben Scott]

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 1:04 PM, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> Contrast with HP: download firmware updates from the website.
> Hardware can be slightly more expensive up front, and they've only
> gotten really solid for things like VLAN's in the past couple years.

  I've found the ProCurve switches I've priced out to be cheaper than
similar Catalyist stuff most of the time.  I think Cat's may have a
slightly longer feature list, but the HP's do everything I could want
and more (VLANs, QoS, SNMP, web management, SSH management, fault
detection, LAN access control, port mirroring, etc.).  And when you
consider the HP's are guaranteed forever, including tech support and
software updates, they become a *lot* cheaper than buying all those
support contracts from Cisco.  Near as I can tell, the ProCuve
division might well be the only part of HP left that doesn't suck.

  Dunno anything about HP's wireless gear or routers, though.

> And, FWIW, I've got a couple dozen WRT-54G[S,L,v4,v3,v2]* units ...

#ifdef ANCECDOTE

  I've got a WRT54GL rev 2 that seems to be slowly going insane.  It's
maybe two years old.  First I had issues with getting DHCP leases over
wireless with the OpenWRT firmware.  Went back to the LinkSys
firmware; that was okay for a while, then DHCP stopped working again.
Switched to manual client IP configuration.  That worked for a bit.
Then wireless stopped working all together.  Currently Ethernet works,
but I really need to buy a new one of these things.  I'm just hoping
to hold out until 802.11n finalizes.

#endif

-- Ben