Newbie Intro wanted

[Hinnerk]

Hi!

First off, i am fascinated by this website. Just reading through some of the postings, in particular the ones that concern the custom firmware, gives the impression that you are not making any reasonable use of your WL-700gE if you use it as delivered... Also, i read some fairly easy to understand tutorial and how-tos, which will be helpful later for me i expect...

Because for now, there are two open issues for me:
1. I do not have an Asus WL 700gE yet and need to figure out if it is the right choice for me. Part of this decision process is the second issue:

2. What are possible uses of the Asus WL-700gE? Well, aside from the obvious, this page gave me the impression that people use it in many different ways. And while i will certainly start with something nice and easy, i would not like to find out after a little while, i'm missing a feature that i need and need to buy something else again... So i would love to hear what different people have in mind with their Asus WL-700gE.

Coming back to issue 1:
Maybe i should give a description of myself, my current setup and the near future planned setup.

I'm a software developer - but nowhere near any hardware issues, so i'm not completely unfamiliar with most concepts i read here about, but i'm not a regular Linux user or hardware hacker Anything that is software development related, like svn (esp. with turtoise) support, database support (mysql) is certainly of interest. Aside from that, i will mostly use the NAS for storing music and backing up files, plus allowing remote access to some files when i'm travelling. Printer server needs to be included.

Current setup is like this:
Fairly fast DSL connection (need to look up specs at home, have'n't got the numbers here).
WLAN Router from D-Link (i think a DI-624+A).
2 Laptops, both with external webcams (usually not hooked up).
Printer with copying, scanning and fax (fax i never hooked up, but who knows...)
I also have an external USB HDD but since it doesn't connect nicely to the network and the laptops move a lot, i'm not using it a lot. Maybe it can be integrated or made completely superfluous, so that i can sell it...

So, to make a long story short:
A: Is the Asus WL-700gE the right choice for me?
B: Can you come up with some inspirations on further uses of it that might be usefull for me?

Thank you for your patience with just another newbie

Hinnerk

[tiwag]

Hello

i bought my Wl700g because i wanted a low-power mini-server,
which does the following jobs:
* lan switch, one desktop PC (running Windows XP) connected
* wlan access-point for 2 notebooks (running Ubuntu Linux)
* print server for a Brother HL1450 laserprinter to lan and wlan
* samba file-server (to lan and wlan)
* ftp-server (to wan)
* p2p filesharing

the firmware which came with my Wl700g (1.0.4.6) does the jobs but not satisfying. the printer was not detected half of the time and only when it was switched on when booting the Wl700g. the donkey-downloads were very slow (about 5kb/sec max. download speed and they got interrupted sometimes when downloading big files > 1GB). the ftp-server was working fine but very slow if directories with much files (>2000) were accessed.
the samba-server and the wlan-access was working fine.

based on kfurge's custom firmware (1.0.4.6_kc_02a) i could set up my system which does all the jobs satisfactory now.
my replacements and enhancements:
* ssh server : dropbear 0.48
* ftp server : vsftp 2.0.5
* p2p filesharing: mldonkey 2.91
* detecting and blocking brute-force-attacks against dropbear and ftp-access: syslog-ng 2.0.4-2 and fail2ban 0.8.1


in the meanwhile i have about 90GB music (mostly mp3) files hosted on my WL700g which are streamed regularly to all notebooks and the desktop PC. Also i host my picture and video collections on the Wl700g.

From the notebooks i do regularly backups of the working data to the Wl700g.

The built-in print-server works fine since i've killed the watchdog process which is started by the asus original firmware. Also switching the printer on and off while the WL700g is running all the time works fine.

ftp-server and p2p filesharing works also fine and satisfying.

HTH
brgds

[Hinnerk]

Now that i looked around for possible other uses i came up with this idea (i'm not claiming it's brand new, just new for me :

There's a groupware called Kolab available, which allows to store emails, contacts calendar and tasks on an IMAP server. So in my setup i want to keep in synch the contacts of my wife and my own, have a common calendar. Client software will be thunderbird with lightning extension (and further extensions).

So:
Is it possible to install an IMAP server on the WL700ge?
Has anyone experience using kolab?
Are there interesting alternatives to achieve this goal?

Thank you,

Hinnerk