As I was saying quite some time ago I decided to upgrading my router firmware. Originally, I wanted to buy this particular model, due it's upgradeability to a open source firmware. The upgrade was a little bit postponed due the fact my computer decided to stop working so I finally managed to do it. If you ask me which were the primary reasons of the upgrade, well static DHCP allocation and SNMP daemon are in the top list. If Linksys would add these feature in the stock firmware, right now I would not add this post. Static DHCP allocation is a very nice feature these days, as you can reshuffle your network (I mean especially in a more business scenario) without touching all the computers/devices out there, but eliminates the disadvantages of changing the device address without any reasons, or not having a predictable numbering scheme. As I said these are quite important in a business scenario, but even at home if you have more than a few devices it worths. Actually, I had a problem with the stock firmware that if I unplugged the router all the devices would have new addresses that usually are not the same, depending which device was faster to request addresses.
The next feature I do not think requires much explanation: graphing the network traffic is quite essential in pinpointing potential problems, so here it goes.
And the lucky winner was DD-WRT after all. I investigated a little bit over OpenWRT, but I decided to go after DD-WRT, since it seemed to me a little bit more interesting. I agree that both distribution have pretty much the same offerings, and even found that they even want to merge to concentrate the effort.
The upgrade process was plain simple, just followed the Wiki installation tutorial and in about 10 minutes it was completed. I decided to skip the mini version and go directly to the voip version. I found that works perfectly going directly to the bigger version, with the warning that it might not work for some devices/versions, but apparently if it doesn't work it doesn't brick your router. This being said I very happy with my latest DD-WRT v23 SP2, and it seems very stable to me. So, keep up the good work with DD-WRT!