Anybody got strong opinions on personal wifi routers for hotel rooms?
 

I plan to make the N800 my only electronic device on my next trip. Since it is possible to turn a free internet access (ethernet) port into a wireless environment using one of these travel routers, what are people's experiences with the easy of use in a hotel room? I am looking at Apple's airport express, and a D-link pocket router, but there are many others. Also, I wanted to know if there were N800 specific issues with certain brands.

Re: Anybody got strong opinions on personal wifi routers for hotel rooms?
 

The D-link travel router is very nice, imo. It comes with a little pleather travel case which holds the router, power adapter, usb power adapter (yes, you can power it from a laptop's usb port) and ethernet cable. It has a single ethernet port which changes function based on what mode it is in. It can act as a client bridge (connects to an access point as a client and offers up the connection on the ethernet side), bridging wireless access point (repeats anything connected on the wired interface over the wireless) or wireless router. There is a little three way switch to select between the modes. Setup is through a web page served up by the device on 192.168.0.30, so you need to assign yourself a static address in that range to change its settings.

I am currently playing around with a La Fonera router which is as small as many travel routers. I have hacked it to run dd-wrt. One of the neat things about this device is it uses an Atheros radio. Atheros radios are software defined and can be made to do neat tricks like "single armed repeating," where the device acts as a client to an access point, as well as a router at the same time! The firmware is in very active development (read buggy) at the moment, so it isn't for the faint of heart.

Re: Anybody got strong opinions on personal wifi routers for hotel rooms?
 

I'm using the Linksys travel router. It works great and I like its small form factor and built in power supply. Range is pretty good too for its size. No complaints after almost 1 year of use in various hotels all around Asia

Re: Anybody got strong opinions on personal wifi routers for hotel rooms?
 

I use an Asus travel router. BTW there's another thread about this already.

Re: Anybody got strong opinions on personal wifi routers for hotel rooms?
 

I have the D-Link as well and it's worked in many different countries for me.
Also, check out the Apple Airport Express wall-wart plug.

Re: Anybody got strong opinions on personal wifi routers for hotel rooms?
 

Sorry! I found it in the accessories section.

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ighlight=hotel

Most people seem happy with their set-up, and most brand name personal routers should work fine with the N800.

I did read one complaint regarding the Airport Express not having a firewall available as a security issue. Do any of the personal routers have this feature? Laptops can use a software firewall, but the N800 does not have a built-in firewall, correct?

Re: Anybody got strong opinions on personal wifi routers for hotel rooms?
 

There's no firewall in most of these devices, and you're correct that there isn't a built-in firewall in the N800 either, because the kernel is built without iptables support as far as I know (iptables=the built-in firewall in the Linux kernel). On the other hand, there are no listening ports on the N800 out of the box, so unless you install some server software on the N800 there's no possibility to reach it from outside. But it's quite common to install an ssh server, either dropbear or openssh. If you're one of those then you should change the default root password right away and you're pretty safe. The only other immediate threat would be if you accidentally installed some trojan or malicious software on your N800 that tries to "call home" (connect to some external place and upload information from your N800), but a firewall in a router won't protect you from that in any case.

Re: Anybody got strong opinions on personal wifi routers for hotel rooms?
 

The N800 has the iptables firewall system, but it's not configured on the device. There's nothing to protect anyway, since the N800 has all ports closed by default.
If you need more protection, you can setup your iptables firewall. :)

Re: Anybody got strong opinions on personal wifi routers for hotel rooms?
 

Cool! That's good to know. If I ever figure out what you said, I'll be sure to set my master password to something else and look into more advanced settings for the device. Thanks again!

Re: Anybody got strong opinions on personal wifi routers for hotel rooms?
 

I use the d-link and also the one below, which is bigger but a little more flexible due to the antenna attachment and wired ports.


http://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Compac...5577405&sr=1-1