I have wired ethernet in my home, but it is an old 10Mb configuration. Since my ADSL will be upped to 24Mb in January, my home network becomes the bottleneck! So the plan is to convert to gigabit ethernet, which is easy since the cabling seems to be good enough to support it. Also I would like to have WLAN since I am getting a smartphone which can use it, also the others in my house kind of want it for their laptops etc. too.

I also have another problem, I have just switched away from cable TV, now I want to have DVB-T/Freeview through an aerial on the roof. I have the aerial installed, but it is not attached to anything, and it will take a lot of annoying cabling to connect it down to the living room.

Soooo, my grand master plan is to install a WNR3500L in the attic, attach a Linux-compatible USB DVB-T tuner to the USB port and compile a kernel with a support for the tuner. Then I can connect it to the aerial with a minimum of cabling and connect to the device over the network from my media PC in the living room. The Gb ethernet connection will have plenty of room for the TV stream, plus I get a wireless network too and of course a fun project :)

It sounds like a crazy plan I guess but I think it will work well and it saves me having to cable the whole house with coax for the time being, if ever I need to for some other reason then no loss since USB tuners are cheap anyway :D I am a long-time Linux user with experience reflashing netgear routers so the software side of it will be very easy for me.

What do you think about my mad ideas?

I want to set up wireless network without relying on it's WEP/WPA encryption. I will use it if it works, but I want to use openvpn on all clients. If somebody can't establish OpenVPN connection, he gets IP with only one router port (1194) accessible. No connection to other clients, no way to internet and other OpenVPN networks.

I am used to OpenWRT. Not as a developer, but as user. I am very dissatisfied WNR3500L does not work well with OpenWRT. It's my experience. First I've tried creating OpenWRT image from trunk according to instructions in OpenWRT for WNR3500L download fro myopenrouter. New WNR3500L come without pings to debrick them. It's a pity. Tech support do not ask anything about software and versions, - if the power indicator is yellow, they propose to return to the store and replace the router.

I've got the second one. Now I used the openwrt_wnr3500l.chk file (beta) downloaded, not compiled by me. udhcpcd crashes, telnet crashes, power indicator once more is yellow.

If I will be fortunate enough to install there working distribution with udhcp, dropbear and openvpn, - wap not required, - I will be happy.

--
Sergey

It is replacing my WPN824v3 router. I am hoping to find a way to run a VPN with the WRN3500L so that I can remotely access my FreeNAS box with all other computers on my network turned off.

Netgear WNR3500L, DD-WRT Kong Mod USB/FTP/SAMBA3/OpenVPN/Proxy Build 18010M, Win XP Home SP3, Firefox 8, ethernet to GlobeSurfer II modem.