I've had a home network for a while. Wired and wireless. In 2004, my wireless-B router gave up the ghost. Power cycling wouldn't fix it, and besides, that was an excuse to upgrade to wireless-G.
The router before this one had been a Linksys. Linksys has emerged at the head of the pack for the home router market, and the WRT54G makes it easy to understand why. (This also makes the horrific experience I've had with a Linksys wireless
access point a little harder to understand.
The WRT54G is designed for home use, and it's designed to be easy to set up and configure. It comes with a CD. I generally don't bother with the CD, since I do this for a living. Still, they do include it.
In fact, if you have a DSL modem or cable modem that uses DHCP, the WRT54G will work out of the box. Plug it in and go. My DSL provider uses PPPoe (in a nutshell: I have to configure a username and password.)
The WRT54G will act as a DHCP server itself, for the machines on your network. Although it only offers the basic options (3 DNS servers and a WINS server) for DHCP options, that's all the home user really needs. By default, the WRT54G works as a standard class C -- you can hook up to 253 devices. You can reduce the subnet mask to let less machines on, but not more. Then again, if you need more than 253 machines, this isn't the unit for you.
Wireless connections, which had been iffy on a prior Linksys model, work very well. In most cases, wherever I am in my house, I got 54 Mbps and didn't have a problem getting a signal. The WRT54G will offer good coverage for most homes. Those two rubber-duck antennas do the job well. They are also easy to position and resist breaking. It's also compatible with 802.11b equipment.
The Linksys WRT54G also makes it easy to secure your wireless -- something a lot of people don't do, and everyone should. Generating WEP keys is easy with a passphrase, and Linksys cards come with a utility that will allow you to enter the passphrase instead of the key. It also supports WPA and WPA2, both personal and enterprise. Anything that encourages security is a good thing -- there are too many open networks out there.
It's easy to tell the status of the WRT54G at a glance. The display on the front clearly shows if it is connected to the internet, if wireless is up, and if any machines are connected through the 4 Ethernet ports on the back. At first you'll have to squint to see it, but once you remember where the lights are, one glance is all it takes.
Yet while it's training-wheels easy for the newbies, the WRT54G offers a lot of options for the more advanced user. By default, it will let IPSEC packets through, if you want to use your home computer to connect to a VPN at work. It supports dynamic DNS through dyndns.org or TZO.com, so if you wanted to host your own mail server or web server, the WRT54G will support you. (Your ISP may have something to say about that if you have residential service.) It has a basic firewall, and can have one host in a DMZ (demilitarized zone -- effectively opening one host to the Internet.) You can set up port forwarding for file-sharing programs or games. You can block MAC addresses or allow only certain MAC addresses. (Every network card has a MAC address. In other words, you can use this to make sure only your computers can access your wireless network -- the kid next door is out of luck.)
In fact, the only reason I stopped using the WRT54G was because I had been elected to become the 'Cisco guy' at the office, and wanted to set up some Cisco equipment. For the average home user, the WRT54G makes an excellent choice.
|
Gumtree.com
