Wireless access points: consumer, commercial, or DIY?

[Henrik Brix Andersen]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:32:07AM -0500, Doug Poland wrote:
> I want reliable wireless in my home.  So what do I need to do, to get it?
> I'm not convinced there's a low-cost solution.  If I have to go up to
> commercial quality and spend near $500, I could build my own Soekris
> net5501-based WAP and use FreeBSD 7.x. for $100 less.
> 
> What are your thoughts, experiences, and/or recommendations?

I too have seen the stability problems with Linksys WRT54G and
friends.

At home, I use a Soekris net4801 with an atheros-based 802.11g miniPCI
card and FreeBSD 7-STABLE (nanobsd) with hostapd(8) configured for
WPA2-PSK CCMP.

I use a few different STAs on a daily basis - a couple of laptops
running FreeBSD, a laptop running Windows XP and and iPhone. None of
these have seen any stability issues with my FreeBSD/hostapd based AP
for the past couple of years (although I had to adjust a few ath(4)
parameters back when I initially configured my AP to make it work
flawlessly with Windows XP).

All-in-all, I can highly recommend FreeBSD as a homebrew AP platform.

Brix
-- 
Henrik Brix Andersen <brix at FreeBSD.org>
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