Hi there, having got an office-supplied WRTP54G and ISP-supplied Zyxel P-660HW-D1, I find myself in utter disgust of poor UI quality (WRTP54G) and perplexed at seemingly simple software bugs (P-660HW-D1), and in both cases sheer sadness that I can't just SSH in and fix the problem myself.

So my goals are:
  - Router with a good wireless chipset (it only needs to work with an iMac and MacBook; this shouldn't be hard but at least the Zyxel can't talk WPA to the iMac)
   - Enough memory to upload random scripts / binaries that I might want to run on the router.
   - Built-in DSL modem.
   - Excellent support for OpenWRT, such that I can assume random bugs/problems are most likely configuration errors and not flaky software

Is such a nirvana possible? :-)

If so, what's the best router to buy in order to get stable OpenWRT that supports wlan + dsl? I suppose my biggest priority is plenty of room in the flash.

Thoughts?

David.

I might add that I'm not tied solely to OpenWRT: if there is a better Linux-for-small-routers available I'd take it, as long as the recommended device was known to work well with whatever that may be. I just want netfilter / iproute2 / etc. etc. to play with myself.

I like WRTSL54GS a lot, others like the Asus premium products.  8 megs flash, 32 megs RAM is enough to do most tasks.  I run a timeserver and some other little things on mine.  Uptime is quite good, easy to debug.  I send syslog output to another system so I have all logs to read when there is any problem.

I would like actually to play with bigger system like Soekris or Wrap2 board. See the Hardware listing in the Wiki.  Unfortunately difficult to find a router with that little bit more oomph and space that I would like.  Everything in computer world gets more RAM with each generation EXCEPT for routers which seem to reach it's plateau in feature-set when the WRT54GS v1.0 came out.  If anything move has been to cut hardware capabilities to minimum to save on costs but sell for same price, since market does not seem to want a Premium SOHO Router.

Next option seems to be old PC and load SmoothWall distro or similar.

(Last edited by vincentfox on 6 Jun 2007, 01:40)

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I suppose my biggest priority is plenty of room in the flash.
"""

Make sure to check out OpenWRT's excellent image builder.  I was afraid of it at first.  But it turned out to be super easy.  And by putting the software you desire in an LZMA compressed squashfs, you'll be amazed at what you can cram into a tiny space.

OpenWRT's efficiency with RAM is pretty notable.  But it's efficiency with disk space is unreal.

Yeah, you can tell I'm fairly new to all this.  Rubber necking and gawking at it all.

And I love it. :-)

-Steve

Hi, David
it is a QA engineer form ZyXEL in china who also have intesting in openwrt, i don't know why you think these is simple software bugs in P-660HW-D1, could you help me ponit them out to me, let me know what can i do for you then.
btw, almost i only know ZyNOS which use in the ZyXEL CPE, but how i can instal the openwrt on P660HW-61 or D1
you know, the 660HW-61 use AR7 TI7300+ wlan chip 1130 and D1 use AR7 TI7200+Wlan chip 1350,exactly same as linksys WAG354G v1 and v2
anyone know how to process it?
Thanks in advance
  Denver.

(Last edited by chnlhd on 20 Jun 2007, 10:08)