I’ve always had trouble with run-of-the-mill networking devices. Over the years I’ve gone through dozens of routers, switches and hubs. The worst offender is always the wireless router.

I’m a network admin by nature and by former trade, so I know how to manage my home network from anywhere. Sadly, this management aptitude is completely useless when the network drops several times a day. Usually when there were torrents involved. My Linksys or D-Link routers just weren’t up to the task of handling so many connections.

So I did what any highly-motivated and intelligent network admin would do for his home network. I bought a Cisco Router. One of the best purchases I ever made. The Cisco 871W Integrated Services Router. This baby does it all: firewall, NAT, DHCP, DDNS, VPN, and more features that I will likely never use. It presents a formidable learning curve: it had to be programmed manually using a proprietary Cisco IOS CLI (command line interface). And between you and me, I’d never done this before, nor did I know the first thing about the syntax or the IOS. So I consulted master Google, who provided some brief but effective training that after a week or so, was able to apply to programming the router properly.

Two years later, it’s only gone down once (but that was entirely my fault and I had to reprogram everything manually once again).