So, we finally broke down and got a new access point and DSL router. I've been hating our Netgear for quite a while. It couldn't be used for wired and wireless and the same time without locking up. It's the Netgear MR314. I'll be selling it. They are fairly cheap on eBay, so I don't expect much for it. It's only a WiFiB access point, too.

So, the new one is the geek gadget all the way around. It's a Version 2.2 Linksys WRT54G. After verifying that I didn't get bad hardware I flashed it the RC4 of OpenWRT. This worked great and was quite quick.

I then proceeded to waste and evening trying to get it in to client mode. Since it could support this, I thought it would be fun to stick it up on our printer for a few days until getting a new network cable up there. Well, I never did get it to work as a client to the Netgear MR314. As I test, I took it in to work to try against our own WRT54G router. It mostly worked. I couldn't get it to see the real world, only the inside network. This had a simple solution and proved that the problem was likely with the MR314.

Now it's up and running as a full replaced to the MR314. It's smaller, much faster (the MR314 peaked at about 350 KBytes per second while this one is getting full speed of 550-600 Kbytes per second to the real world), and smaller.

Did I mention that it's running the OpenWRT distribution of the Linux firmware? This is a wonderful distribution with all kinds of packages that can be installed. I have a bandwidth tester and a traffic analyzer installed. I'm not sure if I really need LUA installed, but the fact that I could is cool. That and micro-perl sounds like it could be fun, too.

During a full speed transfer the load stays at almost zero meaning there are plenty of processor cycles on it's 200Mhz processor to do some fun stuff with. I just have to figure out what now. :)

Posted by Shane on February 3, 2006 9:10 PM | Permalink