[Liverpool] Wireless access points?

[Stephen Watkin]

I'm at the end of my tether with consumer wireless routers / access 
points. Every single one I've ever had anything to do with has been a 
complete nightmare. They either randomly crash and need rebooting every 
few weeks, or randomly forget or ignore their settings (such as port 
forwarding) or break completely for no apparent reason. At this point 
I'm utterly convinced they are all garbage.

As you might have guessed, my access point at home has just failed and I 
need a replacement. Rather than just sink £50 into another bit of 
plastic tat, I heard you can run an access point off a Linux box. I had 
a stab at setting that up last night but I didn't get very far. There's 
a program called 'hostapd' which can run an access point off an attached 
wifi device. I managed to get the daemon up and running, and to get a 
client to connect associate with it, but I couldn't so much as ping 
anything through the connection. As I understand it, the problem could 
be a few different things - either hostapd isn't configured right, or 
the bridge interface on the router isn't configured right, or the 
wireless driver flat-out just doesn't support runnining in AP mode 
(which wouldn't suprise me, as they're all crappy broadcom ones with 
bodged drivers).

Does anyone have any experience with this? Or can anyone recommend me a 
dedicated wireless router that isn't complete shit?

Ste