I almost completely agree with you. Five years ago, I picked up a sonicwall, a pretty reasonable home router + firewall for cough, hundreds of bucks. And I got that because I didn't want to convert an old, noisy, power hungry PC into a router, and I didn't want to spend my time babysitting it.
And it's been good. Silent. Of all things, once a bug in the Sonicwall's understanding of HTTP exploited by ACS 3 was fixed, it stopped crashing (needed a CR only got a LF).
But it has had bugs, it came with a limited number of hosts licenses I could put on my lan (price discrimination to get me to buy the more expensive model), and it hasn't stood the test of time in terms of being a modern DHCP host (understanding for instance how to remap port translations when hosts come on line at different DHCP given addresses.)
I think a linux distro on good home router hardware is ideal. Small footprint, no fan, i/o and peripherals intended for the job. And linux seems stable enough for the job as a router.
No weird CISCO OS to learn, deal with, pirate, upgrade, ....
Here's why I really like it. I would like to give these things away to libraries. Libraries have limited budgets but all sorts of requirements so right now many small public libraries have tens of thousands of dollars budgeted for PCs and internet access and yet they cannot find the $80 for a WAP that would enable two to four times as many users to use their resources as they have now. And by the time you toss all their concerns and requirements into the pool you're left thinking that they really do want a boingo like WAP + server authentication system.
At $150 a pop, I'd be johnny wifiseed giving the damned things to the libraries where I want access. But at $1,000 a pop, plus the reality that they won't install it as they don't have enough control over it, it just becomes a wish for the future.
The problem with most home/home office wifi broadband routers is that it's very hard to put a wifi authentication scheme on it that doesn't require a separate linux server. So you can either try to keep everyone out but one or two machines you manually set up, or you can just open it to everyone. And at the library you want to block port 25 to some folks, maybe everyone, but maybe just some folks. And you want some folks packets to head straight for the gateway, but you would like other folks to have different policies, or to be able to use VPNs.
I would love to play with this linksys and put a wifi authentication/ip tables rewriting system on to it, perhaps using storage on an NFS's exposed network drive, perhaps just using RAM. That would be the perfect low cost, low maintenance wifi router for libraries and places where they need some wifi authentication but also need very low sysadminning.
Oh well.
