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Ask Slashdot: Good Gigabit 802.11N Home Router?
nukem996 writes "This week I will be moving into a new apartment with a very fast Internet connection (100M with the possibility of 200M in the future). I'm used to running OpenWRT on my Linksys WRT54G router and would like a well supported router to replace it. While researching routers I found most reviewers were using the default firmware and since I'll be putting on OpenWRT I'd like to know how well it works when using that. My requirements are gigabit LAN and WAN, 802.11N at 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, well supported by OpenWRT and/or DD-WRT, and USB support would be nice. I was thinking of going with BUFFALO WZR-HP-AG300H but some reviewers say there are range and dropping issues. My ISP suggests the Apple Airport Extreme which isn't supported by OpenWRT or the D-Link 825 which has connection problems as well and a few friends told me to stay away form D-Link. What does slashdot think?"
Get a cheap intel atom with dual intel nics and install pfsense 2.0 and away you go. Most Atoms are under 18 or so watts.
I wish I had mod points to mark it as insightful. pfSense will give you all of the features you will ever want, and you'll never have to worry about it locking up under some sort of load. I use an old Pentium III (old one that was just laying around) that pulls just a little power, and is orders of magnitude more powerful than any consumer router you could get.
You can get a PCIe wireless card to plug into your board, but I just turn off DHCP on my D-Link N router and plug into the switch portion of it. The D-Link would lock up all the time as a router, but acting as a switch/access point it's just fine.
I agree with this post.
I also have the 4th gen Airport Extreme Dual Band and it has been rock solid on my high speed internet connection with all manner of clients. I'm not using a separate 2.4GHz AP, the AE is providing both 2.4 and 5GHz without issue, as well as hardwired ethernet connections to one or two devices in the house.
I share a house with 4 other people and it's been smooth sailing without lock up or wireless issues except for one laptop (running Vista, pre patch) that just would not connect to either the 2.4 or 5 radios on a/b/g or n. Never did sort that out no matter how much fiddling or upgrading we did to the settings on the AE or upgrades and so on on the Vista laptop. Other Vista machines have used it with no issue, so I put it down to hardware conflict with the specific laptop.
As far as ipv6 goes, I have the option for host/tunnel/router/off in the current firmware, but at the moment I am not using it - it's set to link-local only.
We're also sharing a hard drive from the USB port which has also been flawless. Last year we were using a drive on it for an Time Machine backup for one of my housemate's MBP, but she took that drive with her when she moved to AZ, so since then it's just been a big drive with a ton of stuff on it for XBMC. Neither setup has been a problem (despite the Time Machine config being unsupported officially).
My only gripes about the whole setup are that I feel they were slightly stingy on the LAN ports - only three instead of the usual 4 or more you get on most home kit, and the need to use the specific Airport Config utility, which means I cannot modify the settings from a Linux machine - this personally doesn't really affect me since there are a ton of Mac and Windows machines in the house, but it strikes me as a bit of an oversight that could be an issue for someone else (like the article writer perhaps).
If you have a mixed network with at least one Windows or Mac machine for configuration, it is an excellent home router. My other choice was going to be to build something running pfsense, but since the box has to live in someone else's room due to the location of the cable modem, I decided to go with something small and silent that would cause minimal disruption, and the AE has certainly been that.