I honestly can't even remember what it was that first sparked this idea. It was probably a few things. We're moving from an apartment into a new house soon, and (of course) the new house is wired with Cat5e Ethernet, so clearly I had no choice but to make sure my hardware all supported these blinding new speeds.
Accompany me, if you will, on a short trip down memory lane...
A year or two back I purchased a Netgear WNDR-3700v1 router as a refurb from slickdeals. I was already pretty happy running Tomato on my aging WRT-54G, but the price was right, and the feature-set looked great on paper: 802.11a/g/n, 2.4&5GHz simultaneous dual-band, USB connectivity, gigabit, etc...
Well, fast forward to actually getting it, and it sucked. The stock firmware would crash pretty regularly, and it would drop connections like it was going out of style, particularly to my iDevices. This caused no small amount of angry glares from my wife. Well it turned out that it worked fine as a wireless AP, NAS server, and media streamer; it was just the DHCP server that was horked. So I dropped the Tomato-running WRT-54G back in as my main router, switched the Netgear into bridge mode, and went on with my life.
So, there's the backstory.
Getting back to the new house, I decided that I would take a look around and see what was new in the world of routers, so I could actually take advantage of the gigabit wiring throughout the house. That's when I (re)discovered OpenWRT. Essentially a stripped down Linux distro specifically for routers, I have a few friends who have used it with the same hardware I have with excellent results.
So, one Saturday afternoon after browsing some wikis the day before, I decided to take my chances, and dove right in.
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