Last week I finally got fed up with accessing my fileserver (primary storage for my desktop) over 100Mb ethernet, so I decided it was time for a gigabit router. So I headed over to Best Buy and picked up a Linksys WRT310N for $100 (normally $120-$140). And thus begun a strange journey.
As it turns out, somebody thought it would be a great idea to make a $100+ router with a firmware that as close as I can tell was crafted from equine fecal matter. The main things that got me about it were:
1) Nowhere can you set a custom DNS server for the router to forward.
2) You have a limit of ~10 static port-forwarding settings.
Really Linksys? Really? ..and Cisco; what were you thinking, letting them do this?
Well, this wouldn't do. So, I headed over to the dd-wrt project to see what could be done about this.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, only the first hardware revision of the WRT310N works with dd-wrt...and I had purchased the second hardware revision.
Fortunately, I was able to find a WRT310N V1 at the same store, and last night flashed it to the latest version of dd-wrt. And life is good (well, at least on my network )
For some reason the V1 is also significantly faster than the V2 as well. It boots in about a fifth of the time, and negotiates communication a lot faster.
So, the moral of this story is:
Don't buy a WRT310N V2. You can tell this by looking at the serial number on the box. If there is an "F11" in there, it's a V2; if there is instead an "F01", it's a V1.
EDIT:
Also, once I got dd-wrt on it, it's a great little router. Gigabit ethernet and draft-2 802.11n wireless. Solid hardware; just really bad factory software.