Wait! Don't fall asleep just yet!

I've rearranged my office. This has had the result of moving the computers in it a couple of metres further away from the wireless AP which is next to the cable modem in the living room. This means that there's a couple of walls and a floor between the computers and the AP, and now two additional metres of air.

This has had the result of nudging the elderly Netgear WG311 PCI network card out of the envelope of acceptable performance - despite its additional big antenna. The Mac wasn't overjoyed at the prospect, either, but was usable.

I did a bit of a hunt around for a router that will be reliable and have good radio performance, and stumbled across a Buffalo router being sold by the Linux Emporium, here in Blighty. It's described as a "high power" router. I've got a Buffalo router (WBR2-G54S), but that doesn't have an external antenna, and the last firmware update for it was a couple or three years ago.

The Emporium offers it in two guises; firstly, with the factory issue firmware, and secondly re-flashed with Tomato.

I've taken the plunge and bought the Tomato version.

And you know what?

Tomato kicks the stock firmware all over the shop. I can twiddle all sorts of things. I can do QOS. I can haz live bandwidth meter.

Plus it's laid out in a manner that anyone with half a logical braincell can use, without fuss and nonsense.

Swapping the TX and RX antennas has raised the link quality (as reported by iwconfig) from 5 to 26, and odin (the server with the elderly Netgear card) is happy again.

I'm pretty chuffed with this. The router's good, the network speed is good, the firmware is good, and I bought it from a small company, not PC World.

I've got an EdiMax wifi PCI card to go in the server to replace the Netgear. As it's supported OOTB in Ubuntu 8.10, I'll take this opportunity (and the fact that I've finished work for the year) to get rid of that ridiculous LVM arrangement on the server. Backup, fit card and reinstall, I wot.

The router was forty quid and the card another 20.

http://linuxemporium...reless/#pidR26869