On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 11:01:28AM +1200, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > > > And blowing a couple hundred dollars on something that needs the warranty > > > voided to do what is needed, isn’t really that useful. > > i expect that it is still cheaper than any other hardware for the same > > purpose. who cares about warranty at that price? > Money doesn't grow on trees in NZ like it does in Europe.
huh? wrt54g: $150 cheapest mainboard: $56 + cheapest cpu: $83 > $139 + assorted extra costs. a multiport card i could not even find to buy. so if you buy stuff to build a router, you can't beat the price of the wrt54g. if you build it from used parts you don't get warranty. the point i am trying to make here is that there are a lot of hidden costs and issues that you need to take in consideration that make a device like the wrt54g very attractive. > > maintaining a self built machine also costs a lot of time. > Eh? I got an old IBM PS/1 25MHz '486 about 3 years ago as a firewall. > Put more memory in it, then IPCop on it, and it's gone continuously ever > since. I have kept the IPCop s/w more or less up to date. 3 or 4 X 20 minutes > or so for updates is not a lot of time over several years. then you got lucky. the hardware i got failed when we had a poweroutage. and i was not around to fix it. result was months of downtime for that machine and the network behind it. we recently had another powercrash and the machine failed again. i am looking at a few more months of downtime until i can go there to fix it. fortunately by now the router is said wrt54g and the machine is just server. the network behind it is still reachable. in the meantime i am looking for a piece of hardware that is actually reliable (such as the cobalt qube, it survived the poweroutage without even rebooting (despite lack of a ups, show me a pc that can do that)) i too, try to do this cheaply, but the investment in the wrt54g already paid off. greetings, martin. -- cooperative communication with sTeam - caudium, pike, roxen and unix offering: programming, training and administration - anywhere in the world -- pike programmer travelling and working in europe open-steam.org unix system- bahai.or.at iaeste.(tuwien.ac|or).at administrator (caudium|gotpike).org is.schon.org Martin Bähr http://www.iaeste.or.at/~mbaehr/
