MCAndre

Upgrading my Linksys router’s firmware turned it into a dumb hub. I need a new router. Should I get a D-Link or NetGear? I’ve heard varied experiences with Linksys, D-Link, and NetGear. I want a reliable wireless G router (preferably with N support). Maybe Dl-624? I’ll have to decide on a super fast router, Xtreme N Gigabit, and a possibly OpenWrt compatible one, High Speed Wireless 108Mbps. And there’s still the Linksys WRT300N Wireless-N Broadband Router, which uses Linux. Oh wait, the Netgear Rangemax Next Wireless-N Router Gigabit Edition has N and OpenWrt potential. Which should I choose?

Update: Don’t get a NetGear if you have a Macintosh. My highspeed wireless N model barely worked at all with it, so I got another one. The second NetGear worked fine for a few months, but my roommates (who have Macs) complained about connectivity. Now even I can’t get on it. I got the dang thing so I wouldn’t have to use Ethernet cables, but the wireless functionality has been dropping since I bought it. This stinks. I’ve had three routers in a year, and all barfed on me.

I could not install OpenWRT onto my Linksys WRT54GC from my MacBook. All attempts, from the setup page GUI, to MacTFTP, to tftp in a terminal failed with errors like “Error 0: PID wrong.” Google searching these errors yielded no results. The setup page complained of too little resources, possibly due to handling network traffic while flashing the new firmware. Unplugging the Internet connection didn’t help. I decided to upgrade the firmware with Linksys’s latest (1.05.7), in order to have better luck in eventually upgrading to OpenWRT.

I have no trouble getting online, but my router is acting like a dumb repeater. My IP is from George Mason University’s DHCP server, not my router’s. I cannot connect to my router’s private network (even by setting 192.168.1.5/255.255.255.0 manually) in order to get to its setup page or tftp another firmware version. Dead in the water.