Some friends of mine are setting up a wireless network, using these New Zealand made devices called Borgs.
They are AP's pretty much made up of an ITX board, a flash hard drive, and some saeno network adapters.
They are supposed to traffic shape as well as authenticate users. Problem is they are continually bringing up the 'locust' authentication, or nothing at all. (That is how the authentication works, you start web browser and it automatically redirects you to a 'locust' page where you can enter username and password.
Clients either loose their internet feed or dont fwd internet to clients.

Manufacturer's website is www.borg.co.nz. But he uses meshing firmware which in turn uses wiana.org. The logins and passwords are processed at wiana.org which is international so takes ages to sort itself out.
"basically you set the borgs up on the website then they log themselves into the site hourly to check for updates"
Firmware: The BorgBox come preloaded with a meshing type firmware but will run many other Linux based systems.

http://www.locustworld.com/ is the software that just talks to wiana.org from the borg units.
They are too far away from each other to mesh so they are joined together via linksys bridges and hubs at each node.

ANYWAY, the reason for this post, is I'm wondering if there is any other Linux or otherwise software that could run on these units that could do the job but better.

Many Thanks
PS - We live in New Zealand.

This is the only article I know

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwork...ary/l-wap.html

but the hardware does sound very similar.

would a person be able to use OpenWRT with say a linksys WRT54G switch and be able to run it like an AP without haveing to connect them all together with cabeling? i might not be thinking correctly here, but couldnt you do something like that?

of if you need to, hook up say just a laptop, or a desktop and then use the switch as an AP?