Craig Sanders wrote:
yeah, i try really hard to like the idea of using a little openwrt compatible router (because they would/could be great), but every time i look into them in any detail, I end up at the same point:
1. finding a model that has all the features you need is next to impossible. maybe i just expect too much, but every time I find a brand/model that seems like it might meet my needs, i find it has some glaring flaw or deficiency that eliminates it from my consideration.
Usually when I want a new batch, I pop over to #openwrt on irc.freenode.net and ask them what the current best choice is. Obviously your needs might differ to mine, but IME this has worked very well. Those models are also well documented on the openwrt "toh" wiki page. Also, if $customer has a $500 to $1000 budget for a router, I would quite likely deploy an ordinary rackmount x86-64 box rather than an embedded thing.
2. There's a substantial risk of bricking them when you replace the vendor-supplied firmware with OpenWRT or upgrade to the latest openwrt.
Wrong. Sane models have will attempt to boot off TFTP for a few seconds every boot. Even if you brick it, you can install a new image via TFTP. This is how I do *all* installs, because it's less aggravating than dealing with some "upload new firmware" page of the vendor OS.
3. they cost almost as much as a new netbook but have serious deficiencies in CPU power, RAM, and storage.
the lack of RAM in particular would make it painful to run memory-hogging services like bind9 and squid.
Can't argue there, although they're getting better -- 32MB to 128MB this generation, compared to 8MB to 16MB in the previous generation. (If those were needed, I'd automatically put them on a "real" server. And I usually go with dnsmasq/nsd and polipo/squid depending on the use case.)
OTOH they do have the advantage of having multiple 100baseT or Gbit ports built-in, and often have adsl built-in too.
Standard for these units is a 5-port programmable gigE switch. By default port 0 is tagged as upstream and ports 1-4 are tagged downstream, but you can mix it up however you want.
4. openwrt is nowhere near as nice or convenient or flexible to use as a "real" linux distribution like debian.
No argument there.
openwrt has very few available packages
This is getting better. A notable difference between OpenWRT and ddwrt/tomato is that (AFAIK) only the former has a package manager -- opkg -- which allows you to add/remove packages without needing to (re)compile your own full image. Looking at http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1/ar71xx/packages/Packages.gz I can see 2951 binary packages (though these are often broken up smaller than Debian binary packages, thus fewer source packages).