Well I guess after transferring God-knows how many terabytes over the last six years, this little champ of a router finally choked on one last packet.

It started last Thursday when, while bored out of my mind at training for work, I noticed that I’d stopped receiving push email on my phone. I immediately began my internal rant about how Mail2Web sucked a fatty and couldn’t get their friggin’ multimillion dollar servers working properly to save their lives.

Upon trying to log into my server manually, I was surprised to find that it was not responding to any requests. I swiftly concluded my Mail2Web rant and began on a mental tirade against my again web server, a 933MHz Pentium III, circa 2000 (Vintage! Now accepting bids!). Old piece of shit is ^%&*ing locking up again?! I thought I fixed that ()@&ing shit already! I proceeded to my next test to ensure that my thesis was valid: connecting to my Slingbox.

… No Slingbox either. Had my house burned down?

After checking in with mom at lunch, I was relieved to find out that my prized possessions remained safe at home after all. So what the heck was wrong? I spent the rest of my afternoon bored and baffled.

Upon returning home that night, I found my once invincible WRT54G router effectively in a coma with only the faint glow of a half-lit red power LED as the only remaining sign that it had any power. We had a good run old chap.

My nostalgia over this stupid router comes from the fact that it is probably the single best piece of hardware Linksys has ever produced for retail consumers. Released back in 2002, it was among the first consumer-grade 802.11g routers and was revolutionary in that the underlying software which made it work was built atop a customized Linux kernel. This meant that it was fairly efficient, cheap, and almost infinitely tweakable. Linksys has not produced another model nearly as good since. In fact, the only comparable model (which is quite old now) is the WRT54GL v1.1(”L for Linux” – Linksys stopped producing the original Linux-based WRT54G but kept this one model for people like me).

So… I bought one.

“The old king is dead; long live the king!”