I bought a [[amazon:B00007KDVI Linksys Wireless-G and 4-port DSL Router]] from Amazon last week and it is doing a great job. The purchase was somewhat silly as I own no wireless products. But I plan to get started soon, like networking my Tivo wirelessly and perhaps getting a laptop. The main reason I bought it was to replace my dedicated and always-on Linux PC as my NAT router. And for that, it is doing a superb job.

What is ironic, is that is turns out that it too runs Linux, though it is of the embedded variety (ie in firmware). And I think that is WAY cool. Through a bug in their administrative interface and a few scripts, I can access a private telnetd, a public httpd, snort, vi, and other useful tools. Granted it is only a 125 Mhz MIPS processor and 16 Megs of RAM, but it can do some useful stuff. I can do live packet introspection with snort, spray syslog events at an internal PC, or mount an NFS share on the device (hello private mp3 server!).

What’s even cooler, or not as your case may be, is that it only writes to the (temporary) ramdisk of the device. Simply power-cycle the device and it will be back to its normal self. Of course, if you come to rely on the extra services this distribution provides, reinstalling after every reset could be tedious and cumbersome. Anyway, go get your copy of this slick little Linux distro.