Ok, so it's not so exciting, but I had bought a Buffalo WHR-G54S Wireless Router and I had installed DD-WRT onto it. I was impressed enough by the quality of the hardware and how well the DD-WRT software worked that I went ahead and bought another one. In the past, I've used older computers with SmoothWall or similar router projects installed as internet routers, but really, the advantages of using a router like the Buffalo product or certain Linksys routers with an open-source project like DD-WRT or Tomato, such as lower overall costs, less noise, less power consumption, and higher overall reliability (No harddrives to fail), are really difficult to ignore. Still, I might still use a computer-based router for certain situations, such as performance (I've noticed that the Buffalo WHR-G54S's 200 MHz CPU does max out if I've downloading something at the max 7 Mbps that my cable line is rated at, especially if I had QoS turned on. I don't think the old P3 1 GHz system I had as a router even triggered a blip on the CPU. I may have to setup the old router system again to check on ping times in games, too).
I'm also getting the ZyXEL G-102 802.11g Wireless Cardbus Adapter to see if it works any better than the Hawking Technologies' HWC54D Wireless-G Cardbus PC Card Adapter I got a while back in Linux. The Hawking *did* work out-of-the-box (with WEP encryption too!) on Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper, but I really couldn't bother to get it setup with WPA because the drivers couldn't use the standard WPA supplicant system every other card used. Hopefully the ZyXEL will work better for me, but I have a feeling that the Hawking screwed something up when I plugged it into the laptop running Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy. Heck, in Edgy, the onboard wireless seemed to work (but it has no range. Seemed to be a problem over time with it, as it was flaky in Windows), and I even had WPA options with Network Manager until I plugged in the Hawking card. I may have to figure out what it did to the O.S...
UPDATE: Hah! I just posted this today, and apparently there was a Slashdot article about the OpenWRT project that was posted earlier this morning!
UPDATE 2: Hmm... Looking around some more and I stumbled onto this blog post on X-Wrt. Pretty strong allegations about the DD-Wrt project, and if true doesn't bode well for it. I'm going to have to do some research on this. At the very least, there's many other projects going on that I can replace the current install with!
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