Over the past several years I’ve had a wireless network in my house. One of
the problems that I’ve encountered is the lack of network range. My house
is L-shaped with the cable modem in my office at one end of the house. The
signal needs to be able to reach my laptop at the opposite end of the
house. To further complicate things, I have a web server (sometimes running
more than one) and a VPN. Consequently I need to be able to configure port
forwarding as well. 

I’m now on my fourth wireless router since I first installed a wireless
network. The first two were inexpensive D-Link routers. The wireless
network connections on both worked well, but lacked the power to reach the
far side of my house. The second D-Link router had very good port
forwarding capabilities, allowing me to have all three web servers
available on three different ports. When it finally quit working I
purchased a LinkSys WRT100. It was a bit more expensive than the other two
routers, so I had high hopes that it would perform well. The port
forwarding worked exceptionally well. It also had a configuration setting
for dynamic DNS updates. The wireless connections were problematic to say
the least. I had to toy with the wireless setting to get it to work at all.
After changing the wireless channel and several of the other settings, I
was finally able to get a connection by setting the router to accept
802.11G connections only and disabling all network security. Even with that
I had to give all of the wireless computers static IP addresses because the
DHCP server in the wireless router would not issue a dynamic IP address to
wireless clients.  The wireless connections became progressively worse,
until finally I couldn’t even get it to broadcast an SSID. As a temporary
solution, I connected the WAN port on my old D-Link router to the LAN port
on my LinkSys router, using my D-Link router for my wireless connections
and the LinkSys for wired connections. This configuration actually worked
very well, with the exception of the low wireless signal strength that I
was getting from the D-Link.

 I began shopping a new wireless router to meet my needs. The only router
that I found that had consistently high customer reviews was the LinkSys
WRT54GL when flashed with dd-wrt (a third-party Linux router OS).  I
purchased the WRT54GL and flashed it with dd-wrt. I only encountered two
issues when trying to connect wireless clients, neither of which had
anything to do with the router. First, I had to change the wireless channel
to avoid a conflict with my neighbors Wi-Fi signal. Second, I had to drop
the static IP addresses from the client computers, since the previous
router used a different range of IP addresses.  Both the wired and wireless
networks have worked superbly with that combination. I have been able to
get a good wireless connection anywhere in my house. Port forwarding and
dynamic DNS updates have both worked exceptionally well with this router.