August 19, 2011

Upgrade pains

Sometimes I hate buying new hardware. It's one thing to experiment with new hardware, learning and breaking things in the process, but it's another thing when you've experimented enough and want to put the newly gained knowledge into production use, but only to find out shortly later that everything was in vain since that particular piece of hardware was discontinued.

This happened recently with the Linksys WRT160NL. I've wrote about the WRT160NL previously and mentioned that it was quickly turning into my favorite router. Coupled with recent versions of DD-WRT (17201 as of this writing) it's an extremely stable and capable wireless router. I have a number of them running as regular routers (ha!) as well as USB print servers and VPN servers. Unfortunately when I tried to buy more recently, the shops told me they're discontinued and want me to buy the Linksys Cisco E2000 or E3000 instead. I know the E2000 and E3000 are newer dual band routers with gigabit Ethernte ports, but I already have the WRT160NL running smoothly, buying an entirely different series would mean starting everything over again, and with a different chipset too. (Atheros vs. Broadcom.)

After some research, I found that the Cisco E2100L is the equivalent of the WRT160NL. Unfortunately, the E2100L isn't available locally. I called all my suppliers and they managed to find three WRT160NL's for me, so I bought them right away to keep them for future use. Over the past few months I've also recommended the WRT160NL to serveral friends, so I'm actually tempted to buy the E2000 to exchange with their WRT160NL's. I wish I still lived in the States as the WRT160NL is still available from Amazon.com. (Don't trust those reviews on Amazon.com.)

Still, it looks like it's time to break more things again.

1 comment:

DJay said...

I really think I need to take a deeper look into DD-WRT. From what you're describing it seems like the capabilities are almost endless.