Tsudohnimh wrote:
Simply put I want your recommendations for Access Points.

I need to replace my AP and I'm wanting to explore some different options. I figured Memestreams would be a good place to get informed advice. I've got plenty of experience with the enterprise class HP's and Cisco APs as well as the SOHO market usual suspects...Linksys, Dlink, and Netgears but I want your recommendations.

Their are a ton of vendors from Buffalo to Aruba and I'd like to know what you think.

Thanks in advance.

For what application? Corporate network or home? IS there really much that differentiates these products? In the home basically you'd want WPA and some basic firewall rules. If you're a super nerd you might get one of the Linksys "L" models that lets you load an open source linux distro and do a bunch of QoS and management stuff with it. See this.

Decius wrote:

Tsudohnimh wrote:
Simply put I want your recommendations for Access Points.

I need to replace my AP and I'm wanting to explore some different options. I figured Memestreams would be a good place to get informed advice. I've got plenty of experience with the enterprise class HP's and Cisco APs as well as the SOHO market usual suspects...Linksys, Dlink, and Netgears but I want your recommendations.

Their are a ton of vendors from Buffalo to Aruba and I'd like to know what you think.

Thanks in advance.

For what application? Corporate network or home? IS there really much that differentiates these products? In the home basically you'd want WPA and some basic firewall rules. If you're a super nerd you might get one of the Linksys "L" models that lets you load an open source linux distro and do a bunch of QoS and management stuff with it. See this.

Well, you don't really have to be an alpha-nerd these days to hack your own linux-based AP. DD-WRT and Open-WRT make it really quite easy. Check out DD-WRT for probably the easiest distro to get up and running (IMO). Also, these days there are quite a few routers that are Linux based that you can use with good results and the feature sets are way more comprehenstive then the vendor builds. But, I highly suggest that unless you are a super-nerd, it's best to stick to release versions of DD-WRT unless you want to brick your AP in no time flat. But, if you can surface mount a JTAG interface then it really doesn't matter. But, that's not for many people. So, stick to the release versions of DD-WRT and follow the upgrade instructions to the letter and you shouldn't brick your AP.

A few additional suggestions, get a lot of flash if you intend to add packages to your AP. It's really nice to be able to ssh into your AP and use tcpdump, ping, traceroute and other utilities troubleshooting. But, you will need enough flash to load these. So, get something with more then 4MB of flash for the most basic set of utilities. 8MB of flash seems to be quite good. 2MB is really a bad idea in general because you can only run the stripped down builds.

Cheers,
Thratchen

Aren't most of the 3rd party firmwares for router implementations? I only need an AP so I think that excludes me from most of these add on features.

This is actually for a home to support 4 clients. I've used Linksys for years and love them but I'm just curious as to what else is worth looking at.

I normally run WPA2 PSK AES or WPA2 Radius. I'm mostly concerned with stability, coverage, and longevity. I also love the multiple SSID's with HP/Cisco's but I can't justify the cash to put one in my home.

I've also played with 3rd party firmware's with linksys products but decided to play it safe. I appreciate the continued input.