ask Dr. LJ about home wifi routers

[danceboy]

The Sweatshop house router is showing its age, so I'm thinking about replacing it with something that doesn't crash every week or so when it's warm out (which is to say that this summer it's actually been pretty reliable). So I'm looking for suggestions.

I've heard tell of magical routers that will download your torrents all on their own, provide NAS, act as a media server, make your breakfast, and change the baby. Do these actually work? Are they easy to set up/keep up (tinkering is fun, but I will soon have negative free time)? Do people actually find that they like it?

As far as I can tell, I want something with WPA2, but that doesn't seem to be all that difficult these days.

Most of the machines in the house speak draft 802.11n, and soon it should be all of them. Which makes me think that we'd actually see a benefit to a draft n router. On the flip side, I've heard that these tend to be less reliable. Anyone have data or anecdotes?

Please let me know what you think. And please don't feel that you have to have answers to any/all of my questions to comment. Thank you very much.

Comments

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

I tend to use very cheap Belkin routers, because anecdotally they've been the most reliable for me. They don't do any of the baby-changing features, and I haven't had any experience with "smarter" routers. I would speculate that the least tinkering will be achieved when you have a "real" computer do those kinds of tasks, but maybe there's a power efficiency in putting those things on a router so your machines can sleep.

(There are some very clever Wake-on-LAN setups out there, too, which sorta let you bridge the gap between those two, but I don't know how well they work, either.)