[pXMzR2A]

> an even older Linksys WRT54GL

That thing has been working for almost ten years (granted it is not an office environment), once with openwrt and now with tomato, while rebooting its little and adorable self every night at 3am automatically so that I don't have to.

It's an amazing piece of hardware that makes one say "back in the day".

[UnoriginalGuy]

It was good for its time, but has limited onboard RAM, limited storage, and pretty slow WiFi by modern standards (there are even faster G-band, let alone N). Wouldn't recommend it today, and certainly wouldn't recommend touching Linksys with a ten foot pole.

As to stability, I'd describe it has a mixed bag. I owned one for just under five years and had to do fortnightly restarts (which I eventually automated), and we also owned one at work which needed nightly reboots (DD-WRT provided that).

PS - In fairness to the work one, the building was insanely congested. It was one of these buildings which are shared by three dozens small businesses, and each had 1-2 WiFi networks, plus the local homes also. When you spun up a WiFi analyzer it could not find an empty piece of spectrum, and a lot of routes/APs would crash if you left the "find best frequency" option checked (as they would hop continuously and never find anything).

[jessewmc]

Do you have any particular recommendations for new(ish) consumer routers?

[UnoriginalGuy]

I buy Asus stuff then flash third party ROMs. Here's a massive list: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices

If I was buying something today, it might be the Asus RT-AC66U (since it is a "compromise" between price/performance).

[beedogs]

I've got 3 Linksys E3000s that seem to be working fine with DD-WRT and Tomato. One's the main router, one's the VPN endpoint(s), and one's a spare.