Garage Sales May 7
I hate garage sales since most of the items for sale are worthless junk. I know that that you can find some very good deals, but for the most part it is a waste of time. Though I do enjoy going to the community garage sale that Addison has once a year. It occurred last weekend. I got up early which is a big deal for me (I am a total night person). Most of it is baby stuff and other assorted junk, but this year I found a lady selling some Linksys routers. I managed to get a WRT300N and a WRT54G for 45 bucks. I thought I got a pretty good deal on them since amazon sells the WRT300N for $129. I really did not need to 54G model, but it does not hurt to have an extra.
I flashed them both with dd-wrt which is an open-source firmware. I have been using this on my current router. It is a nice product that adds a lot of nice features to the router. I have been using the SPI firewall and the static DHCP features of it. I made the WRT300N my main router since my Macbook Pro supports the 802-11N draft standard. I configured the other router as a client bridge which I use to connect my Audiotron MP3 receiver to the network. I have been using a Linksys WET11 Bridge which only supports B which is two revisions behind the current draft N standard. The other reason I wanted to get rid of the WET11 was it only supported WEP which is a much older wireless encryption. I am now running WPA which is much more secure.
It took a while to get the client bridge configured, but I got it working. I did have to turn on the SSID broadcast to make it work, but it is seems to be working fine now. This leaves me with my original router, but it is nice to have a backup just in case one of the other ones stops working.