Hacker-friendly wireless router from Netgear

The new Netgear Open Source Wireless-G Router (WGR614L) is a full-featured wireless router designed to serve as a reliable, high-performance platform to support a wide variety of applications created by the open source community.

The high-performance WGR614L features a 240 MHz MIPS32 CPU core with 16 KB of instruction cache, 16 KB of data cache, 1 KB of pre-fetch cache, and incorporates 4 MB of flash memory and 16 MB of RAM. In addition to an external 2 dBi antenna, the WGR614L integrates a second internal diversity antenna to provide enhanced performance and range. The router supports free open source Linux-based Tomato and DD-WRT firmware and will soon support OpenWRT.

The WGR614L, which features one 10/100 Internet WAN port and a four-port 10/100 LAN switch, incorporates an 802.11g access point to support wireless connectivity at speeds of up to 54 Mbps. The WGR614L supports static and dynamic routing with TCP/IP, VPN pass-through (IPSec, L2TP), NAT, PPTP, PPPoE, DHCP (client and server), and Bigpond. A Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) firewall protects the network from intruders, and the wireless connection is secured with support for 40-, 128- and 152-bit WEP encryption, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), WPA2-PSK, and Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS). Additional security features include: Exposed Host (DMZ), MAC address authentication, URL content filtering, logs and e-mail alerts of Internet activity.

The NETGEAR Open Source Wireless-G Router (WGR614L) is backed by a one-year hardware warranty and is available at a retail price in the U.S. of $69.