[LUNI] Wireless & wired router recommendations?

[Gerald Guglielmo]

Hi,
    My setup at home has some connections using wireless and some wired. 
One the wired side: NAS (Netgear/Infrant); HP Ethernet printer;  Linux 
desktop. On the wireless side: Windows laptop; Tivo; occasionally a 
laptop from work. Over the past 3+ years I have tried in succession two 
D-Link wireless routers (with four wired ports), models DI-624 and 
DI-524. Initially they both worked great and were easy to configure over 
time via a web interface (making it very Linux friendly). However after 
many months to a year, they each started exhibiting problems on power 
cycle. The initial symptom presented is that no network connections work 
and all the activity lights are stuck on. Unplugging all connections and 
power cycling (waiting at least 30 seconds each time) eventually works, 
but sometimes it would take half a dozen or more tries. This got worse 
over time as the probability of success (and number of repeated cycles)
would increase as the month went by. Invoking reset from the web 
interface would also cause the same symptoms as power cycling only you 
could only do that once. That is the common symptom between both models. 
They each also had a more annoying failure symptom which differed from 
the others. The first one would randomly lose it's lease with the cable 
modem and only power cycling all the equipment multiple times would 
eventually resolve the issue (I was able to rule out the cable modem 
after a lot of trial and error). For a while this happened about once a 
week and I thought it was the cable company up to no good, but when it 
started happening every 12 hours or less I replaced the router and the 
problem went away.
    The second router seems to have developed a more subtle problem. The 
HP printer uses a 169.* private network address, while the router gives 
out DHCP addresses in 192.* range. Until last weekend everything was 
fine and both wireless and wired addresses could ping the printer and 
print files. The wired connections can still ping the printer and have 
no problems printing files, however the wireless connections cannot even 
see the printer. At first I thought this was a Windows firewall issue 
and I spent a long time trying to figure out what McAfee might have 
done. However it now appears the problem might be that wireless 
connections in general cannot see the 169.* addresses but the wireless 
ones can.
    So now I am in the market for a new router that will have at least 4 
wired ports, does wireless with DHCP, and is easily configurable from 
Linux. Needless to say I am not thrilled with D-Link at the moment, but 
I do not have enough experience to know if the failure rate is typical 
of home grade routers. Does anyone have any recommendations for the next 
router I should try? I would greatly appreciate it, thanks.

-- 
-Jerry->
gug at fnal.gov
Pepe's Theory of everything: "Under the right circumstances, things happen."