While doing that podcast with Daniel, I noticed I was seeing 30% or so packet loss on my wifi network. After rebooting some equipment and keeping an eye on things, I decided to scrap my faulty Airport Express base stations and replace them with Linksys WRT54GLs running a custom opensource firmware called Tomato.

While the instructions are good, they assume you already have the router up and running. The first thing I realized was to throw the windows install cd away and just plug my mac into the switch on the back. The router will be listening on 192.168.1.1:80 with a username and password of admin/admin. The instructions will carry you from that point.

I have a 3 story house so I bought two routers and bridged them together with WDS. My only complaint is that Tomato's WDS is difficult to setup. The Airport Express admin utility did a wonderful job of easily bridging the two aiport express base stations together.

Except for one of the routers dying after only a few days, which Amazon was nice enough to replace for free with next-day shipping, things have been great on Tomato. 4 bars everywhere I go in the house.