On 2011-01-06 at 20:17 -0500, Phil Pennock wrote: > On 2011-01-06 at 16:42 -0800, Tom Perrine wrote: > > Anyone want to share experiences with the Airport Extreme? I'm thinking of > > replacing an 8? year old first-gen WRT54.
> I'm happy with mine and would only even consider replacing it with a > custom setup running open firmware and my choice of OS; no way I'd be > happy going back to any other vendor's stock image. For the archives, and anyone looking for advice, I am hereby retracting my previous endorsement of the Airport models. The "being tied to an Apple device for management" this year turned into a horrible breakage point: Apple produced a management tool for iOS and then reproduced the exact same UI for their _desktop_ management tool, forcing management to a lowest-common-denominator feature set. You can accept the updates, or fight them; if you take the update, you lose access to (going from memory) logs, SNMP management, visibility of DHCP clients (other than those on wireless) and probably more. In other words: the only stable supported management interface has turned these devices into toys, not manageable devices. They're probably fine for consumers (ie, not people on this list) but then so is a default firmware from any of the cheaper product manufacturers. If anyone's looking, I'm very happy with a Netgear WNDR3800 running openWRT; the vendor uses open Linux firmwares by default and make it easy to replace the firmware entirely, the unit chosen has plenty of RAM, is simultaneous dual-band with multiple GigE ports, and generally just works. With openWRT, I've got an IPv6 SixXS heart-beat tunnel running and Unbound as the DNS resolver, so I have a DNSSEC validating resolver between my home network and the world. Airport Extreme is $179, WNDR3800 is $100-$110 at reasonable vendors, with hardware that's at least equivalent and a default firmware which is probably suitable for most folks. -Phil _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
