I picked up a Linksys WRT1900AC from shopgoodwill.com for $15. It's a
powerful router, with gigabit WAN ports, USB 2 and USB 3, and a decent
about of flash memory.

One neat thing about the Linksys routers when using third-party
firmware like OpenWRT or DD-WRT is that there's two firmware images
loaded on the system. When you do a firmware upgrade, you upgrade one
side. If that upgrade goes south, reboot 3 times without getting fully operational and it reverts to the other side.

You can "arrange" your firmware, like keeping the OEM linksys firmware
on one side and OpenWRT on the other.

For those who don't know OpenWRT, it's an open-source router OS that
runs on many routers that ship with closed, proprietary UIs surrounding embedded Linux. More routers that you'd think fall into this category.

With OpenWRT, you have a ton of features and extensibility not available
with stock firmware. I've used OpenWRT to host an OpenVPN server, create selective VPN tunnels out for selected applications (cough cough
NETFLIX) and created a reverse proxy so multiple hosts could share one
IP address.

It's worth a look.



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