I'm soon going to be setting up a wireless network for me and some buddies and (hopefully) making it secure. I have some questions and concerns regarding this and figured someone here could give me a hand and steer me in the right direction.
I have a WRT55AG (version 2) loaded with the factory firmware. I've heard that it's possible to load your own firmware onto routers like these. Is it worth it? What can be achieved with it?
I was wondering what kind of security I should use on my wireless. Ideally I would want all devices to be 'accepted', but I'm not sure how to accomplish this. I'm guessing it has something to do with MAC addresses, but I don't know the first thing about them. It would be great that ALONG WITH encryption (I'm told WPA2 is the best), every device would need to be added to a list of some sort before even being able to access the AP.
Another feature I was thinking of would be completely hiding my wireless from showing up on other people's computer. Is this possible (like an SSID broadcast thing). Is it worth the trouble?
One more option I was looking to implement would be bandwidth calculators. Ideally something in the router to measure the amount of bandwidth being used and how much has been used for that month (this has to do with bills and limits, obviously). Is it possible to throttle down speed when a certain limit is reached?
These are alot of points but I was hoping someone who has more knowledge than me in this subject could give me a hand and a few pointers. Hopefully all this is possible and I'm not dreaming :)