Robert, I went to the local department megastore and "cheaping out"
gives you nothing close to what you've spec'd here. Save $20 and you
lose gigEthernet. Save $20 and you lose dual band. You've spec'd one
with USB 2.0, and with all the dev bells and whistles, and I don't see
much that comes close. You've done your homework: Looking through the
list of supported devices, the wndr3700 v2 is near the top in terms of
processor speed, flash, and ram.
Hey, I've got a dual band gigE router with USB already. Oops, it's on
the "unsupportable" list. Oh well. I don't need to worry about bricking
anything, since I've got an unbrickable backup. That makes the missus
happy.
Regrets, but I can't add anything about the reliability of the product,
but on price, it looks like this is a winner. You might be able to find
one for $20 cheaper, but wait, is that a V1 with half the flash?
I did read some reviews; complaints about dropping wired LAN
connections, firmware upgrades that performed like downgrades, people
"power cycling three times a day"; all of it could mean anything. When
you look on that OpenWrt forum, they tote is as the champion on price
and out-of-the-box compatibility.
You've tweaked my interest.
On 17/04/2011 6:26 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
as a followup to my posting yesterday about a LUG-wide project to
select a single decent wireless router and make an openwrt project out
of it, i ran across the netgear WNDR3700 (v2). you can see the brief
specs here:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start#netgear
and a more detailed doc here:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/netgear/wndr3700
as well as a detailed writeup on how to download, build and install
here:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howtobuild/build.wndr3700
which suggests it should be a safe choice, and it would seem to have
all of the features i'd minimally want, including at least one USB
port, plus a serial port and JTAG in case someone wants to get
ambitious. it's available at canada computers for $139:
http://canadacomputers.com/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=netgear+wndr3700&x=0&y=0
which is, admittedly, a bit pricey for a wireless router but it is
dual band and gigabit so there's that.
i updated my openwrt source tree and followed the instructions in
that third link and, other than a couple trivial updates to the
recipe, i got an image to build. haven't tested it yet since i don't
have the router, but i know CC has 3 in stock in their rideau store so
i'm planning on popping down there today and getting one.
thoughts? are there any fatal drawbacks to this choice of router?
any alternative suggestions? the fact that it's listed as supported
and that someone wrote a fairly complete recipe for building the image
already suggests it would be hard to go wrong, but i'm open to
dissenting opinions.
rday