OT: What we want are things that work; what we get is technology

[Ben Eisenbraun]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2010 at 01:38:21PM -0500, Richard Pieri wrote:
> It isn't 30% pilot error.  Access points suck.  All of them.
>  Manufacturer is irrelevant.

That is my general opinion as well.

> Cost is irrelevant.

Spending more typically gets you more capable hardware.  E.g. the higher
end, higher cost Linksys models will have larger flash, more memory, faster
CPU, USB, etc.

The OpenWRT hardware wiki is valuable for looking up stuff like this:

http://oldwiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware.html

I went through a handful of cheapo Linksys, Netgear and Dlink AP/routers 
for a few years and had the usual spate of problems with dropped
connections, packet loss, client association problems, etc.  I was using a
Linksys, and it died one weekend, and in casting about for a short term
replacement, I threw a decent Atheros PCI card with an external antenna
in my FreeBSD file server and set it up as the AP... and all my problems
went away.

I ran like that for about a year, before I had a hankering to use MythTV
again and converted the file server back to linux, which necessitated
buying a standalone AP.  (Yes, I know I could massage the MythTV box into
being an AP, but I need my home router to more reliable than my MytvTV
machines have been.)

I bought a higher-end Linksys WRTSL54GS (266MHz CPU, 8 MB flash, 32 MB RAM,
USB) and flashed it with OpenWRT, and it worked great for about 2 years
with no problems with hanging, dropped connections, etc.  Then either the
radio died or something started spewing horrendous RF interference in my
neighborhood, since the SNR dropped through the floor and the wireless
stopped working.

I started looking around for a replacement that could take a nice high gain
external antenna and decided to bite the bullet and buy an Alix 2d2 
<http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d2.htm> from Netgate along with a 1 watt
mini-PCI wireless card with a A/B/G Atheros chipset and an external 7.4 dBi
antenna.  It was about $250 total.

I initially tried putting OpenWRT on it, since I was pretty happy with
it on the Linksys, but the Atheros driver they were using didn't work well
with the mini-PCI card.  It would initialize the radio and a client could
associate, but after a few minutes the card would lock up and the kernel
would start spewing errors into the logs.

In the end I tried pfsense, and it worked great.  It has been rock solid
for more than a year now, and I've had no problems with Windows, OS X,
linux, iTouch/iPhone and Nokia N97 clients.

So I'm back to FreeBSD on my router, and I'm a happier man for it.

-ben

--
nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to 
be normal.                                           <albert camus>