September 12th, 2009 ··· andarius
Another item removed from my home in the break-in was my Linksys WRT-54G WiFi router. It was one of the nice versions to have being a 2.2 so I was pretty sad to lose it. It was running a recent version of dd_wrt and supported all the systems in my apartment except for my server photon. To get things up around the apartment in the aftermath I went to the office and retrieved my backup/toolkit router which is a WRT-54GC. I popped a spare external antenna on it and it has been serving me faithfully (though weakly) until last weekend.
I was hoping to hold out for N to leave draft but I think tribbles may invade the planet before that happens. To replace the little fella I finally broke down and purchased a D-Link WAP-2553 WiFi AP. The unit is dual band, operating in the 2.5 GHz and 5 GHz bands though not at the same time. The main reason for targeting a dual band is I can move to the less congested 5 GHz band should channel space become and issue. Other reasons for choosing this particular unit? Reviews, feature set, design, cost and GPL. Half reading are likely rereading the GPL part. That’s right boys and girls, it comes with a GPL OS on it, nmap claiming it is a Linux machine.
With the feature set the unit has out of the box I see no need to run any custom code on it. It does everything I want/need and more. A whole lot more. Later on should I decide to move it to a remote location it even supports PoE out of the box. Since it is an 802.11a/b/g/n-draft device I can move where ever I choose in the WiFi spectrum should my neighbors be knuckleheads. Granted I am more likely to shut them down it is nice to have options. 
I am not a hardware reviewer so I will leave unit performance at it works great. Configuration was simple and fast. Performance is excellent in terms of all of the clients associating and operating on it. Props to D-Link for putting this puppy out!
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