For those who have an older 500mhz+ box lying around, I have been using Astaro for my home router. I found a 500mhz Celeron HP and added half a gig of ram. I have gigabit on the lan side and 10/100 on the wan. I haven't rebooted this router since I installed it.
Granted it's Linux, so it shouldn't ever need to be rebooted, but it's been rock solid for me, which is far more than I can say for my Linksys, Belkin or Netgear routers I have tried....
As a college student, even tho an older one, I wanted to do tech support just to interact with customers, and be able to help them. I assume that this might be beneficial when I go out into the "real world" and do this stuff for a living.:) I have a strong client base throughout the central part of my state and my clients keep calling so I am doing something right.
Most of these clients are little old ladies that mess AOL up, and some are family, etc, etc. For the people that are NOT family I tend to be cheap as it's a "small second income" so I don't need it to survive. Previously I was charging a miniscule rate of $20/hour. That was fine, and no one complained.
But as I started doing more, I'd jump into a problem and fix it, and then completely forget how long I was working on it.
So to sum this up, I cheat. I visit a major retail chain's computer site *cough* BestBuy *cough* and I simply charge half of what they do depending obviously on the task. I decided to NOT reinvent the wheel, but to just customize it a bit. So far, no complaints.:)
Slashdot Mirror
For those who have an older 500mhz+ box lying around, I have been using Astaro for my home router. I found a 500mhz Celeron HP and added half a gig of ram. I have gigabit on the lan side and 10/100 on the wan. I haven't rebooted this router since I installed it. Granted it's Linux, so it shouldn't ever need to be rebooted, but it's been rock solid for me, which is far more than I can say for my Linksys, Belkin or Netgear routers I have tried....
Most of these clients are little old ladies that mess AOL up, and some are family, etc, etc. For the people that are NOT family I tend to be cheap as it's a "small second income" so I don't need it to survive. Previously I was charging a miniscule rate of $20/hour. That was fine, and no one complained.
But as I started doing more, I'd jump into a problem and fix it, and then completely forget how long I was working on it.
So to sum this up, I cheat. I visit a major retail chain's computer site *cough* BestBuy *cough* and I simply charge half of what they do depending obviously on the task. I decided to NOT reinvent the wheel, but to just customize it a bit. So far, no complaints. :)
Not sure if this helps....