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JunkJunkPosted Jun 30, 2008 14:21 UTC (Mon) by massysett (guest, #52736)Parent article: Netgear's open wireless-G router for open source hackers
I owned the non-open-source version of this router. It was a piece of junk. It constantly dropped connections. This was my first router, so I thought this was typical--I thought it was interference from other routers, from the microwave...I moved the router around, which didn't help. Then I paid three times more for a DLink, and it is rock stable. Looks like the average Amazon.com reviewer doesn't have better luck with this router either. I doubt open source firmware will improve this piece of crap. Go try the Linksys WRT54GL instead.
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Junk Posted Jun 30, 2008 16:44 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Then I paid three times more for a DLink, and it is rock stable. Hmmm, interesting. I always thought Linksys (at least before Cisco bought them) and Netgear were *much* better than D-Link in terms of reliability. Of course, this was 3+ years ago during my days as an employee at a big-box electronics retailer (we carried all three brands, and guess which brand had a significantly higher return rate than the other two?), and besides, vendor/brand reliability does change over time... Generally speaking, I'm surprised (yet pleased) that Netgear has chosen to open-source their router--it seems that in the past few years, electronics vendors have avoided releasing their wireless hardware with open-source firmware and specs, hiding behind the fear of FCC violations by hackers running the devices out-of-specification (thus violating the license). It'll be interesting to see what Netgear did (and how) to mitigate such possibilities.
Junk Posted Jun 30, 2008 19:30 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] That's probably a problem OpenWRT can solve. Hardware doesn't drop connections, software does.
works for me Posted Jun 30, 2008 21:17 UTC (Mon) by undefined (guest, #40876) [Link] i too have the closed-source version and it works fine, though i only use it as an access point and only with one or two wireless clients at a time. when used daily, it would need to be power-cycled about once a month (the activity lights would blink acknowledging receipt of traffic, but the router wouldn't route the traffic to/from the wireless side). now it gets used less frequently (two or three times a month) and only needs to be power-cycled every month or two (~1.5 months). i've benchmarked single-wireless-client throughput overnight and had no problems with the router surviving that, so maybe it depends on your specific use-case. i even have a shell script for cacti to scrape the router's statistics/counters from the web interface, so the closed-source router does everything i want, even in lieu of "advanced features" like snmp (though admittedly, i have limited requirements). i bought a buffalo WHR-G54S two years ago, but it's still in the box as the desktop linux router/firewall it was meant to eventually replace still works great (if it ain't broke, then don't fix it).
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