Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

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With their WiFi access points I suspect it's because WiFi gear gets overheated and break down. (Probably fried capacitors.) I have given up on Apples' and other premium gear WiFi because of this. Now I just purchase 3 new cheap WiFi routes every 12 - 18 months and throw away the ones I have.

I have another Linksys "premium" home router ($200-300) but the WiFi died on that too, but it lives on as an OpenWRT home router but with WiFi disabled. The Apple WiFi routers also lived on for a while with WiFi disabled but acting as TimeMachine backups. Then the disks died and I couldn't be arsed to pry open the case with a hair drier to get at the disk inside and replace it. So for my home, the setup went from Apple all-in-one combo gear with routing, WiFi and backup disk, to specialized functions for WiFi (cheapest off the shelf), routing (openwrt), and backup disks (standard NAS hardware). (For TimeMachine.)

I hope my 15" Macbook lasts for a really long time, because when it's dead I don't know if Apple has any Macbook I want to have. But that's tomorrows sorrows..., no use worrying about that until the time comes. (I guess I can always fall back to Linux and some PC laptop.)

You might want to consider investing in some better gear, like some Ubiquiti APs and a proper firewall appliance (e.g. pfSense or a Ubiquiti firewall as well). For not much more than the cost of your 'premium' home router, you could buy 2-3 APs and a firewall appliance and have a much more reliable configuration (or at least, less to buy when something dies).

I did invest the time and money in a pfSense, but that's WAY more complicated to configure [correctly] than my old and retired AirPort Express. I really can't blame "normal" people for not going that route and I'll join the crowd pining for the Apple that was.

OpenWRT IS a proper firewall appliance and will run on just about anything. I basically have your solution in place already...

OpenWRT is a good-idea firmware running on consumer-grade hardware which almost definitely can't deal with what you're throwing at it.

Just beacuse you paid a bunch of money for it and flashed it with a better firmware doesn't make it good hardware, and custom firmwares often have poor support (and, on more than a few occasions, worse performance) than the default firmwares optimized by the manufacturer for the specific hardware they have.

The fact that you have to keep buying new hardware tells me that you have lousy hardware and should step up to proper hardware rather than expensive consumer-grade stuff.

Yes. Or you know, keep replacing the parts that break, the things with WiFi i them. These run stock firmware. The one with openwrt is now for routing and firewall only and works fine. (Wifi disabled, Ethernet only.) A benefit to replacing wifi gear so far has been to keep one step ahead of the neighbours in the wifi spectrum. Gets crowded signal wise downtown.

My random cheap MSI wifi router is about 10 years old, been on all that time.

My work expensive Cisco access points are so reliable I've never seen some of them in 10 years (they're above the dropped ceiling)

What you call "premium" is in reality just overpriced consumer gear. Ciscos enterprise access points happily sustain 5 years of thorough use without an issue, but they cost more than 300$.

(I typed a reply to this but it doesn't seem to have been saved....)

What the heck are you doing with your WiFi gear to have these problems? I've used all kinds of cheap-o routers over the years, and never had problems with them overheating. Are you living in the desert without A/C or something? My current router is just a cheap TP-Link dual-band I got used on Ebay; it runs DD-WRT and has been working fine for 1.5 years hiding behind my sofa. Before that, I had a cheap Cisco/Linksys e1000 I got used and ran DD-WRT on for probably 3 years. I gave it away to someone, and last I heard it still works just fine. Before that I had some D-Link I think, which I replaced because a firmware update prevented my network print jobs from going through (obviously not a hardware problem). I've also had (about 4 years ago, for work) a Cisco/Linksys dual-band which worked great, and a Cisco enterprise AP which was very reliable though the IOS UI was the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. Honestly, your post is the first time I've heard anyone complain about WiFi routers having overheating problems.

Maybe I'm luckier because I usually run DD-WRT and set the transmit strength a bit lower, but I've only done that with the last couple of routers.

I don't know really. I live in the same country you do. Maybe you could class my closet with a PC and a Mac Mini for remote compilation as a local desert of sorts. It gets pretty warm in there.

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