WL500g
I completely redid the network at my parents today. I’ve bought an Asus WL500g gateway/router/access point already a month ago. It is replacing the two Linux boxes I had there earlier (the gateway and the wireless router). Although it was nice to play with the basestation, these boxes gave my real network learning experiences… still going to be a bit of a pain to turn them off and put them away.
Running Linux
The Asus WL500g is quite a nice thing running Linux. They do give specifications of the machine and there is nice custom firmware with SSH and other useful enhancements (I want to thank the people of the WL500g info forum for there help). I plugged the printer in, which immediately worked as a HP JetDirect RAW port for my CUPS setup and my parents Windows XP print FUBAR. In the custom firmware they have killed the GPL violating lpr hack (Raw printing) and replaced it with this solution. So it does almost anything now: NAT, SSH server, LPR, DHCP, DNS, DHCP-DNS, web interface, busybox with flashfs and all this syslogged to a remote machine.
Debian on the Asus WL500g
I tried to install Debian on it but ran into troubles. First my USB stick wouldn’t keep an ext3 fs working for 5 minutes and then I had problems with getting the modules for the wlan and ethernet card working (depmod crashing, etc.). Then it ocurred to me that except for it being nice to do apt-get and stuff of the base station, it isn’t very useful since the station can do all I want already. Well, almost…
A IPv6 capable kernel-and-tools-firmware has already be made, now just waiting for a working radvd and it’s a real drop-in replacement. :)