Linksys Routers

[Forboding Angel]

Now owned by cisco (for some time) and has the name plastered all over the brand. Before this trend, I have steered clear of linksys because of the idiot interfaces and crap functionality of yesteryear. Since being bought by cisco have they improved, declined, changed at all?

I'm kinda intending to pose this question to the people "Who would know". If you own a linksys router, that's fine and good for you, but if you don't know any technical detail about it, it's not useful to me (unless you care to talk about performance and features).

In your opinion, is linksys something that I can recommend to my customers without fear of random bullshit (I know, I know, it's never an exact science ). Previously I would have recommended either d-link or some of the higher end home netgear stuff, but d-link and netgear have fairly unintuitive interfaces and require someone to actually know what they are doing most of the time.

The name cisco inspires a lot of confidence simply by seeing the logo on the box, but has cisco influenced linksys technical/fundamental design? If it's jsut a logo on a box, well all I can say is "Figures" and "Typical".

[Argh]

Personally, I've usually been happier with Netgear's stuff. Better UI, less hassle with cryptic things I don't need, but it's all there if you want it. I guess it really depends on the scale of the traffic, but for any ordinary LAN, I've found Netgear worked well both for home and business use.

[==Troy==]

Own several linksys routers.

OpenWRT or Tomato firmware will cure your hassle with GUI and allow you to do effectively ANYHTING on the router.

At the moment one is running torrent client, the other one is a VPN server while also managing the local wi-fi in the house.

I have not seen any other brand actually open sourcing their firmware

[tizbac]

I have not seen any other brand actually open sourcing their firmware

at least 1/3 of closed source ones are using illegally GPL software including linux kernel

[Peet]

I got tired of crappy soho routers so I bought a dual xeon server and put windows 2k3 on it.

[tizbac]

By putting windoze on it you 100% ruined it...

[CarRepairer]

By putting windoze on it you 100% ruined it...

You don't like Microsoft Windows? I am shocked and surprised to learn of this new development.

[Peet]

I tried two open-sauce router distros (pfsense and SME) - both worked for a little while and then magically died and stopped routing until they were rebooted. Windows worked out of the box.

[FLOZi]

I've only ever owned Linksys routers, never had any issues with them.

Haven't they been owned by cisco for over a decade?

edit: 2003 apparently. Half a decade then.

[tizbac]

I tried two open-sauce router distros (pfsense and SME) - both worked for a little while and then magically died and stopped routing until they were rebooted. Windows worked out of the box.

I'm using ubuntu 8.04 server with 2.6.30 custom compiled kernel , 87 days uptime, still working and i have used hibernation 2 times since last reboot

iptables support is all what you need, no need for dedicated distros, and optionally also traffic shaping

[Forboding Angel]

I got tired of crappy soho routers so I bought a dual xeon server and put windows 2k3 on it.

Hehe I had a hardware linux firewall box at one point, was all set up for me so I didn't ahve to do much with it, nor learn linux, but I also couldn't administrate it properly either, so it was pretty much useless tbh lol.

Linksys firmware is open sauce? Now that's interesting. I have to say I like that. So is basically the concensus (sp?) that it is fine to recommend linksys products? I still ahve some qualms about it though. However, I'm not sure why. They all extend from being concerned about the quality of the firmware. Netgear and d-link firmware aren't anything to be particularly happy about, but they get the job done fairly nicely.

Hmm, wish I could jsut go buy a linksys router and fuck with the firmware myself. I don't enjoy recommending hardware that I'm not familiar with, because I'm the first person that gets called when that hardware fucks up, so it is very important that I recommend good, solid, quality products. Otherwise, I'd be out of business in a month.

[Gnomre]

I use a wrt54gl with dd-wrt, works great

Honestly I don't think you can really lose as long as you steer well clear of d-link

[aegis]

picked up four linksys wrt54g routers a while ago on sale, very happy with them + dd-wrt

[AF]

When are we porting spring to the DD-WRT OS?

[tizbac]

i have two wrt54gl linksys routers , i use them as AP & client cause standard wifi adapters aren't powerful enough to cover my house

[Caydr]

Pick up one of the Wireless N ones that can be flashed with better firmware.

I have a WRT150N or something like that. Great router once flashed with DD-WRT. It's in my bedroom on the third floor, the computer in the basement picks up the signal very well and the receiver down there isn't even an N-type, just a no-name G. If you put one of these on the middle level of a 3-level house house, you'll get a good signal anywhere in the house or in the immediate area around it.

Actually my signal is so good my neighbor from across the road told me he was very displeased with some of the questionable names I've come up with for my home network over the years. I've since changed the name to "The guy at #32 doesn't lock his back door".

I haven't even bumped up the broadcast strength, it's just sitting at the default 70mw. Best part is, its uptime is like 130 days last I checked, and what made it die on that day was a power outage.

[==Troy==]

I got tired of crappy soho routers so I bought a dual xeon server and put windows 2k3 on it.

Hehe I had a hardware linux firewall box at one point, was all set up for me so I didn't ahve to do much with it, nor learn linux, but I also couldn't administrate it properly either, so it was pretty much useless tbh lol.

Linksys firmware is open sauce? Now that's interesting. I have to say I like that. So is basically the concensus (sp?) that it is fine to recommend linksys products? I still ahve some qualms about it though. However, I'm not sure why. They all extend from being concerned about the quality of the firmware. Netgear and d-link firmware aren't anything to be particularly happy about, but they get the job done fairly nicely.

Hmm, wish I could jsut go buy a linksys router and fuck with the firmware myself. I don't enjoy recommending hardware that I'm not familiar with, because I'm the first person that gets called when that hardware fucks up, so it is very important that I recommend good, solid, quality products. Otherwise, I'd be out of business in a month.

Then why bother asking someone else's opinion if you already has made a choice?

[Forboding Angel]

Why don't you try reading the first post again?

[Caydr]

Linksys got caught using stolen code so they were forced to GPL it, IIRC. Then they noticed that these hackable routers were flying off the shelves and kept their future routers hackable. Ever since then, it's been a choice between shitty proprietary firmware that crashes if you try to transmit data through it, or a Linksys router.

I don't know for sure that ALL their routers are hackable, but you can get a good list of them here:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices

Note that DD-WRT is now The Great Satan if you're talking to a Linux guy. It works perfectly but the guy who develops it isn't a flower child or something, I don't know and I don't care, it works great.

Note that Linksys routers have a habit of getting revised, and the newer revisions tend to have less RAM, causing the router to be slower and more prone to crash, or less flash memory for the firmware to be stored on. This is why I like the WRT150-N, as far as I know there's only one model for it.

For instance, the WRT54G (possibly not the GL version) was revised 6 times I think, each time shittier than the last. I got the v5 version and it was still pretty much rock solid though, I just had to use a smaller version of the firmware.

[AF]

Linksys dont want you running these opensource firmwares on their routers because that expensive router they released with the fancy features is obsoleted by the cheapest router hacked with custom firmware

This is why they fought back by reducing the amount of ram in their routers so that there wasnt enough ram to run the custom firmware, but of course memory footprint optimization fixed that, and theyve been playing cat and mouse since.

A lot of the newer linksys routers simply lack the ram to run anything worthwhile, and linksys specifically brought out a more expensive version with extra ram.