New wireless router

[Lennart Sorensen]

So two days ago, my WL-500gP suddenly decided to stop doing its job,
and after pwoer cycling it it no longer booted.

Reflashing it seemed to get it booting again, but not for long, and I
then discovered the WAN port had turned into a LAN port on the switch,
which meant the switch chip was no longer being configuring correctly.

So time for a new router.  After looking what was available at local
stores and researching them, I found out simultanious dual band routers
with 802.11n are actually getting affordable now, and some of them are
being worked on and will probably be supported by openwrt and the like
pretty soon.

So I bought a D-Link DIR-825 rev B1 with 2.02NA firmware (all nicely
labeled on the outside of the box.  Linksys could learn something here).
Very specificly NOT a rev A1 (which is apparently a piece of junk, with
totally different hardware and software inside).  The rev A uses an ubicom
CPU (300MHz proprietary RISC chip), while the rev B uses a 680MHz atheros
7161 MIPS 24k CPU.  The rev B runs linux (the A does not apparently).
So with a 680MHz CPU and 64MB ram it is quite decent performance.
So far I am impressed.  The signal strength for the various wifi enabled
machines in the house is much improved over the old router too.

I really like the guest wifi feature.  I now have it running as:

wifi5 - WPA2/AES 5GHz 802.11 a/n

wifi24 - WPA2/AES 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n

wifi24ds - WEP 128bit 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g guest (firewalled from the
other wifi and hence internet only access).  I run my Nintendo DS lite
on this now.  I never had it able to connect to the internet before
because it doesn't do WPA.

The only issues with the default settings are a couple of misfeatures.
The QoS support by default tries to measure the upstream bandwidth to
decide how to configure the QoS support.  This takes a while, isn't that
accurate and slows down boot time by a noticeable amount.  I turned
that off and set my 1Mbit upstream speed manually.  Boot time is now
much better and nicer.  The second misfeature, is a capcha at the login
screen in addition to the password.  That is totally stupid, not even
a well done capcha, and I turned that off too.  Everything else is great.
Well the blue LEDs for the ports and power and such are awfully bright.
I made mine face the wall for now. Apparently blue means working and
amber means not yet working on this thing rather than red/green.

So I would certainly recommend the DIR0825 rev B for anyone that wants
the everything in one and at the same time wifi router.  Once openwrt
and such hopefully one day runs on it, it will just get better.

I also like the fact that the first thing you see when you open up the
box, is a printed copy of the GPL along with an offer of getting a disc
with the GPL parts of the code by writing them or sending an email.
You can also download it from the website ofcourse.  The CD with the
windows software also has a note on the back for Mac and Linux (both
listed explicitly) users telling them where on the CD to find the
documentation files.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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