Dodgy Linksys

You may not have noticed it last week, but my primary router — an elderly Linksys BESFR41 — popped it's clogs and stopped working reliably.

It was hardly surprising, as the little blue beasty had been in service 24x7 for the last almost 5 years since I got broadband in 2001. 5 years of service for an outlay of about HK$400? Not bad.

I've replaced it with the wireless BEFW11S4 unit I've had (I prefer to keep the wireless traffic on a separate VLAN, so that none of the neighbours can be a spammer on my dime.), but that thing is appallingly unreliable. It needs a power cycle every one or two days!

Anyone still running Win95 would probably be impressed by that, but involuntary reboots are not something I like to see here, in the rack with Linux, Mac OSX and my Palm. (OK, there's a WinXP box as well, but I haven't turned it on since I finished playing Half Life 2: Episode 1.)

Currently the Linux box has 17 days up time (mainly because I rebuilt it), and the Mac is on 20 days, which is probably after the last major update from Apple.

Also, my job can take me away from home for weeks if not months at a time, so I want to have something reliable keeping my mail-server and websites on the internet.

I'm considering a Linksys WRT54GL with OpenWRT firmware. Does my imaginary reader have any experience of that combination?