I use the Netgear WG102 access point in a few client sites, mostly small to medium business that use wifi as a secondary form of access. For about $120 you get an 802.11g access point that’s plenum rated and supports PoE, auto-channel and auto-signal strength, VLAN’s, SNMP, multiple SSID’s, and every security feature under the sun (including 802.1x RADIUS auth). What it doesn’t provide is good centralized management or any sort of serious wifi intelligence, which limits them to smaller shops.
Despite this great bounty for only $120, they do have a major weakness - they tend to lock up after about 2 weeks of normal use, which requires a hard power-cycle to resolve. After some Googling, I recently stumbled across a work-around on Netgear’s forums. It seems by setting an SNMP OID to a certain value, you can cause the access point to do a soft reboot. The trick is to schedule such an event on a weekly, or even daily, basis, so that it occurs before the AP has a chance to lock up. The command below works quite well using the Windows task scheduler and the Net-SNMP tool set.
snmpset.exe -v 1 -c private 10.10.10.10 1.3.6.1.4.1.4526.4.3.9.1 integer 1
Just change the community string (in this instance, private) to your R/W community, and of course the IP address to match your AP. I have this running at two locations each rebooting 5 of these AP’s on a weekly basis and so far no lockups.