New router ordered

[johnridley]

I bought a cheap Rosewill wireless router for $25 a few months back to replace our ailing WRT-54GL. It's OK but I couldn't get it to run Tomato (it's advertised as doing so). This morning Newegg's flier advertised one of the nicer Asus routers for $38, so one of those is on the way. Those are pretty well reviewed as lasting a while.

For whatever reason, it seems to be the norm that wireless routers last 2 or 3 years and then die. I suspect mostly of bad capacitors. The old Netgear 514s that I bought several of all died of bad capacitors.

Comments

[traveller42.livejournal.com]

We have two WRT54GLs running Tomato linked using WDS to connect two adjacent houses. This is currently working pretty well.

Our first router was a Netgear RT311 which was retired because it couldn't handle BitTorrent when I started supporting the Ubuntu launches. This was in 2008, so it lasted at least 9 years and the hardware was still good.

I'll have to see what happens with the older WRT54GL. It was purchased in 2008 to replace the RT311. The second WRT54GL was purchased that year for ham radio use.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

The GLs are pretty good, though not exceptional. They're pretty overpriced these days, you can get good Tomato platforms from Asus for $40 to $50 that have all the features of the GLs and then some. This one is normally $54 and it has USB print share and NAS features (including with Tomato USB); last I checked the GLs were more than that except on sale. They're certainly never as cheap as the $38 this one sells for.

My GL works OK except if the power flickers, the WAN port doesn't function. It's just not there. Even if I telnet into the box and try to manually start it up via modprobe or whatever, it won't come up. To solve the problem I have to remove power from it for 5+ minutes then plug the power in cleanly. Since we have so many power flickers here, it just got too irritating to deal with.

[bwittig.livejournal.com]

I got the Asus RT N12 last July and loaded DDWRT onto it.

I seems to be working quite well, plus the cheap 4$ aftermarket stupidly long antennas I added seem to work well too. Not that I have done any tests to see if the longer antennas give me any better range or reception. The Linksys GL takes a different connector for which I was not able to find a cheap replacement antenna.

We shall see this Spring if the antennas improve the range.