[ale] Cheap hackable wifi router

[Pat Regan]

Brian Pitts wrote:
> I noticed that open-mesh (a very cool project) is selling the Accton
> MR3201A wireless router [0] for only $29! I believe this is the same or
> very similar to the routers used by Fonera and Meraki. These are based
> on an Atheros SoC with a 183mhz cpu, 8mb of flash, 16mb of ram, one
> ethernet port, and two wifi radios. With two radios, you can run a
> public network and a private, encrypted network at the same time.
> They're being sold with ROBIN [1], an openwrt-based firmware that
> provides dead-simple mesh networking, but you can run vanilla openwrt or
> ddwrt on them as well.

The price doesn't sound too bad.  It has twice the flash of all my
WRT54G devices, too.

However, it doesn't seem to have two radios.  It just lets you put 2
SSIDs on the same piece of hardware.  You've always been able to do that
with openwrt, although it was complicated until Kamikaze.

The only thing I dislike about it is the lack of local ethernet ports
(one would be enough to make me happy).

I've only personally used WRT54G and GL routers (I deployed over 20 of
them running OpenVPN at a company I worked for).  However, I have a
friend who is running a cheaper Buffalo router that he claims has a much
better radio than the Linksys routers.  Of course, it runs openwrt.

I don't remember the model of the Buffalo, but I remember it being a
good 20-30 bucks cheaper than a WRT54GL.

Pat



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