I’ve been using the combination of a cheap Sweex broadband router with an old Kobishi accesspoint to provide myself with a wireless internet connection, but the age of the equipment was starting to show. The accesspoint would not pass through DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and it failed to provide service a lot lately requiring me to reset and completely reconfigure the old thing about every 2 weeks. Sometimes it lasted longer, but sometimes I had to reconfigure it even multiple times per week.
The Sweex broadband router on the other hand is still functioning perfectly, but I didn’t want to just get a new accesspoint, this time I wanted it to be all in one.

ASUS WL-500g Premium

The ASUS WL-500g Premium is a multifunctional wireless broadband router. It, ofcouse, shares the internet connection to several computers that are connected to it’s network, but it also has 2 USB ports which can be used to connect a printer to it and share that over the network as well. You can also connect a USB harddisk and configure the device to have FTP functionality inside as well as outside of your local network. You can also just use the connected harddisk in the way you normally use shared folder on the network with Windows.
The filesystem used on the harddisk must be either FAT32 or EXT2. FAT32 is known to most people as it is one of Windows’ native filesystems which has been widely used ever since the release of Windows 95 OSR2 (could have been called second edition, but it isn’t) and by many people it’s still used despite the fact that is has no built in security options like NTFS (the other native Windows filesystem) has. EXT2 on the other hand is a UNIX filesystem, but has support for much larger drives and files than FAT32 has, so I decided to go with that one and that was tougher to accomplish on Windows than I had expected.
Natively Windows does not support EXT2, so support must come from a third party and I could quickly conclude that there aren’t many third parties who have created a EXT2 driver for Windows XP Proffesional x64 Edition, if any. So the idea of using Partition Magic popped into my head, but even that didn’t work on my Windows x64 installation. So I took the Partition Magic cd to my dad’s pc which has the normal version of Windows XP Proffesional installed and on there, voila, I could reformat my 300GB USB harddisk as EXT2.
Before I did that however, I ofcourse backup up everything that was on the disk and now I’m putting it all back on it and this is really taking a lot of time, long live the speed of wifi.

Allthough wifi isn’t really fast, it’s still fast enough for me. I don’t require extreme transferspeeds inside my house as I hardly ever copy stuff from one PC to another, but now with this extra small sized fileserver in my network it is possible for my dad and brother to access stuff like ISO’s, music and all that jazz that I have stored on my 300GB external harddisk without me having to be there to share it on my own PC and I can access stuff I might need while I’m working on another PC than my own.

What’s also very important is that this device is extremely easy to configure. It has a built in wizard which let’s you set it up quickly without needing to have any real networking knowledge. Ofcourse you have to know something, but it’s not much for this one, that’s for sure and if you can’t figure it out, there is always the manual and if the answer isn’t in there, then there is a more detailed manual on the CD that comes with it.
It’s not the cheapest wifi broadband router around though, at €99,95 even a Linksys WRT54g series broadband router is cheaper, but those don’t have all these extra functions like the print- and fileserver. And even though it’s not really cheap I’d still recommend it to anyone who is still looking for one.