I have also had good results with the TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND Ultimate Wireless N Gigabit Router running OpenWrt and use them as network firewall/gateways, OpenVPN server/clients and small VLAN-capable switches.

The hardware specs are great for the price ($55-$65): 5 gigabit ports, 802.11n and the real winner is that OpenWrt has good support for the RTL8366RB switch chipset, including tagged VLANs. Getting a switch that has VLAN support for this price is not otherwise available, that I've found. The stock TP-LINK firmware does not expose the VLAN features but they are there and available if OpenWrt is used.

- Chipset is the Atheros AR9132 rev. 2 WISOC, which contains: Atheros 3×2 (3rx, 2 tx) MIMO wireless + MIPS 24Kc V7.4 CPU running at 400Mhz) – 266.24 BogoMIPS
- RAM: 32 MB
- FLASH NVRAM: 8 MB
- 801.11n/g/b 2.4 GHz
- 4+1 gigabit Ethernet ports (RTL8366RB chipset with 802.1Q VLAN support – see http://www.realtek.com.tw/products/productsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=18&PFid=15&Level=5&Conn=4&ProdID=197)
- 1 USB 2.0 (can put a small USB stick in and use it as swap space to run programs that otherwise wouldn't work given 32 MB of RAM, such as dansguardian)

The one main problem I've found is that some wireless clients have problems connecting using 802.11 -- see the bug "Backfire ar71xx error: ath: Failed to stop TX DMA!" at https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/9693 for examples. This has improved with -rc5 and -rc6.

-Tim Miller Dyck

One thing that burned our test users with Impress is that when images are dragged-and-dropped in, they are linked, not embedded (PowerPoint defaults to embedding). This caused one of our users to take an image-heavy presentation they had carefully assembled and have no images show up on the presentation machine.

When you add images using the menu in Impress (testing with 3.0), you can choose to link or embed, but when dragging-and-dropping, which is what our users were used to, the default is link. This cannot be changed as far as I could determine (see bug 15369).

Impress also converts embedded images to PNG, which can really inflate their size compared to JPG.

To give some context, this is a short column I wrote for this week's (4/21/2003) eWEEK news package on Windows Server 2003. It's short because of print space limitations. The whole collection of related news articles in this week's issue is at http://www.eweek.com/category2/0,3960,1034194,00.a sp.

Next week, eWEEK is publishing an eWEEK Labs review of the product. In that package, there are six pages of copy covering Windows Server 2003 overall security changes, IIS 6.0, 64-bit Windows, Active Directory changes, file and print changes, development, and storage and SAN changes.

Thanks,
Tim Dyck
eWEEK Labs West Coast Technical Director