I was at my local Goodwill Outlet last week and saw a pristine WRT54G V2 for sale with power adapter -- since they sell by the pound, it was $1.80.
It's in pristine condition, the plastic isn't faded and all of the stickers are intact. Fired it up, installed DD-WRT firmware, and put it in my office as a wireless AP. It's amazing that these things are still running and do pretty much everything you need it to do. It's only G wireless, but I mostly use this for connecting my laptop and desktop on the switch to copy files.
I'm using it as an access point, I have another router that's a border gateway between my LAN and my ISP; I'm going to install the VPN client on the office AP and use it as a full-time VPN endpoint; if I want to go out in cleartext (like gaming or netflix) I'll go out on the home WLAN, and when I want to make sure I'm sending out encrypted, connect to the office WLAN.
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