Got a new Asus WL-500GP version2 and I am extremely happy with this. Now I have a 24×7 download rig without the need to continuously power-on my laptop. I just start my downloads by logging into the router’s transmission torrent client once and that’s it….. rest of it is taken care of.
Here is how I got this setup done……one of my colleagues was actually using this and posted details about this router. Liked it by looking at what all one can do on this router and got one from US. Btw, though the asus website shows many dealers in bangalore who sell this, none of them actually have one. The only way to get it is through an agent in Mumbai who gets stuff from US that is generally not available in India. We just have to give him the link to the product (amazon, ebay, etc.) and this guy ships it to us with some additional charge ofcourse.
Here is how my setup looks like now:
  I kind of started loving dd-wrt firmware too much. My secenario was I had to put my two routers in different rooms and had to get them connected wirelessly. This requires the client bridge mode which is very easy to setup with dd-wrt firmware. Neither the linksys stock firmware nor the asus stock firmware support this natively.
Now coming to flashing the firmware, the Asus router comes with a restoration utility on the CD which comes in handy if we brick the router. But somehow the restoration utility never worked for me 🙁 .So, I had to flash my new firmware using tftp. Initially flashed the oleg firmware (in the second attempt 🙂 ) but setting up the client bridge mode seemed to be complicated. So, decided to move to the DD-WRT firmware and after another 2-3 attempts of firmware download I got it working finally.
And from here, setting up the client bridge mode and getting the USB disk to work was pretty straightforward. Installing the transmission torrent client was also simple. One more advantage of this router is with the USB disk connected to it, you have a NAS server that can make this disk to be shared in the local network. So, my problem of having a NAS device also got solved. In fact, few months back I was looking to buy a NAS device but did not find a suitable one for me. The stable ones were priced too high and the cheaper ones were not good.
Now, I connected a 160GB 2.5″ laptop hard disk to the router and I have a startup script saved in the router that restarts the transmission client once power is resumed after a power cut. So, apparently the downloads go on 24×7. There are quite a lot of other features as well on this router but did not explore them all. Will keep posted here if I play around more with it.