Advice Requested

[kyles]

Advice Requested as to which hardware to purchase that guarantees a successful deployment with Gargoyle with zero hassle?

I am attracted to the Gargoyle project because of its apparent ease of use. Most importantly I am in great need of reasonable access restrictions which encompass specific PC(s) with their own specific time of day and website restrictions. Looking at the GUI samples it seems that Gargoyle has the features I am after.

What I don’t have currently is a lot of time to hassle and debug anything. I am desperate for a turn-key solution. In the future as time permits I would like to hack on it.

Can you please recommend a hardware router that is most likely to offer me the greatest road to success? It does not even need to have wireless features as I currently have a draft-n router which works great and I like the speed. Like I said I am in desperate need of a good way to restrict network access which is the motivating factor for me. I am assuming that if you recommend a wireless router I can simply turn off its radio.

Please, suggestions?

Thanks
Kyle

[Eric]

My favorite router is the linksys WRTSL54GS, and it would probably be best for what you want. Unfortunately, it has been discontinued. If you look around (Google is your friend here) you can find a few places where you can buy a used one.

Since simplicity seems so important to you, I would suggest that if you can't get a WRTSL54GS, that you should buy a WRT54GL, which is still manufactured. The main reason the WRTSL54GS is better is that it has twice as much RAM, which means it will probably be more stable. If you're mostly just going to use the basic network features + access restrictions a WRT54GL should probably be ok, but if you want to use QoS, web usage monitoring, and dynamic dns too, the lack of RAM may cause some issues.

Another reason I would suggest the linksys routers is that if you run into problems with Gargoyle, it's easy to switch to another alternate firmware -- both tomato and dd-wrt support these devices. Gargoyle certainly has, by far, the most complete set of access restriction features of any firmware out there, but I feel obligated to warn you that it is still in beta. You seem to want a solution that will work 100% flawlessly right away, and I can't guarantee that, at least not yet. I try to test everything, but that's no substitute for user feedback and testing over a longer period of time, and Gargoyle is not as mature as some of the alternatives. On the other hand, if a user reports a bug on the forum I try to address the problem within days, if not hours, so you're guaranteed a high level of support.

I therefore recommend you get one of the two linksys routers I suggest, try Gargoyle (install Beta4 and then upgrade using the bleeding edge .trx -- a huge number of bugs have been fixed since Beta4), and if you run into too many problems you can easily switch to something else. (Though if that happens please report the problem in the forum first. I'm rather anxious to find and eliminate whatever problems do exist.)

[hotzenpl0tz]

As a user of the WRT54GL I have to point out that I have had one or two router crashes that I suspect come from low memory (I use ddns, qos) because they happened in situations where alot of connections where open (bittorent downloads, other programs opening alot of connections).
Question also to eric: what about the Asus router that is reported as working on your page, wouldn't that have more ram and work with all other wrt firmwares as well ?

[Eric]

The Asus WL500GP (both v1 and v2) will definitely work, and they do have more RAM. However, I found that installation is a bit trickier on this device. I had to use TFTP. However, Kyles seems to want something as simple as possible, and it's really easy to just upload the proper .bin files for either of the linksys routers. If he's willing to make the tradeoff of somewhat less straightforward installation, but more stable, that's certainly an option.

[alenhoff]

if you can get your hands on a wrt54gs v3. it has twice the space and memory as well. i have had no problems running openwrt with the gargoyle frontend on it.. never uses more then 18mb's of memory. out of 32

[FRiC]

I also think WL-500GP V2 is the best choice now (I have one). The WRT54GL has too little RAM and crashes easily with lots of connections. Plus the newer versions of Gargoyle may use more flash space too, as I couldn't install the openvpn package on it. It used to work though.

[kyles]

Thank you all for your input. Your advice is much appreciated.

I am not intimidated by an install process that requires usage of TFTP (assuming this means Trivial File Transfer Protocol) or something of that nature. I consider this easy enough.

I will look into the WL-500GP V2 and learn about it. I would guess that using this as fallback capable hardware will work in the same way that Eric was pointing as a benefit for the Linksys router?

I’ll check back for any additional input you might offer. I greatly appreciate your time!

Thanks all
Kyle

[hotzenpl0tz]

@fric: why would you chose V2 of that router ? Isn't V2 the version that has onboard broadcom wlan that doesn't work with kernel 2.6 and thus recent kamikaze/gargoyle releases ? For kyles this shouldn't matter of course since he stated he doesn't need the wlan functionality but V1 has a mini-pci wlan card afaik and thus if you someday wanted to use the wlan and broadcom still isn't supported correctly you could easily switch the mini-pci card with an atheros based card.

[Eric]

The broadcom versions of Gargoyle are still based on the version of Kamikaze 8.09 with a 2.4 kernel. The b43 driver is not sufficiently mature for me to feel comfortable using the 2.6 version. Therefore the Asus WL500GPv2 should work just fine.

[hotzenpl0tz]

Oh ok, that makes sense. But I do have another question then:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Har ... us/WL500GP

Important notice: there is a long standing bug that makes it impossible to do port forwarding (NAT) with this router on 2.4 kernel, see https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/2558. Otherwise the router works great, if you can live with the reduced functionality.

Is that still true ? If so, at least for me that would be a show stopper. I think that was the reason I bought a 54gl a year ago and not the Asus, although I was really keen on the USB ports of the Asus.