> Point is, there's a piece of perfectly _suitable_ and _usable_ hardware that's running just fine at the job for which it was originally intended, but the manu

> Point is, there's a piece of perfectly _suitable_ and _usable_ hardware that's running just fine at the job for which it was originally intended, but the manufacturer's abandoned it. Fortunately most[1] wrt54g devices are re-flashable, so if the slow lan speeds and poor wifi support are not a problem, you can get another few years out of it. > But, say you've sold me: what's a decent replacement. And a Free-Software based ROM to put on it (I'd like to put extensive blocklisting on the gateway device itself). At home I use a pair of an edge router lite and a random TP link AC router in AP mode (basically, DHCP server disabled). You can't really buy a decent AC access point, it's much more cost effective to buy a router and put it in AP mode. A Unifi UAP‑AC might be nice, but it's 3x the cost the tp-link was. I haven't bothered re-flashing the TP-link, but I made sure I could when I bought it. The edge router lite will probably end up running something like openbsd or pfsense in a few years. [1] a few ran vxworks with flash too small to support linux