Where I live now I have a slackware box that heads my network. I used to use this linksys router but it was a complete POS.
:uptime
10:04:51 up 358 days, 12:53, 3 users, load average: 1.35, 1.29, 1.13
I got a APC battery UPS from Sams a little over a year ago and now I've set it up and forgot about it. It's the most stable setup I've ever own personally. I use it mainly as a router / file storage for my home network. The computer is something I found at work and isn't all that powerful. It doesn't have to be just to do a masquerade, finch, IRC and rtorrent. Whenever I get a wild hair up my ass and want to download some kind of torrent it's not big deal to ssh into it from my phone or at work and just paste the torrent link to rtorrent.
The only issue I've come across is that I've found that windows media center works a lot better than mythTV. I might get an argument after saying that but I just didn't have the patients to sit there and completely figure out mythTV. Plus the xbox already has media center so it's just better to have some windows box somewhere catching TV for you and streaming it to your xbox. On a network like you are setting up it should have no problems doing that.
At a friends house what I did was before he put up his drywall, I dropped PVC pipe in running it to the receptacle boxes for the RJ45 plugs in each room. We did cat6 to all the rooms and the reason for the pipe is that if in the future we want to upgrade to a faster future standard we can just tie a string to the end of the wire in the receptacle box. Pull the wired out of the pipe from the attic. Untie the string, and then tie up the new wire and pull it back through. Don't know how long you are going to be there but that's the best solution I could come up with.
At work we needed wireless so I setup a cheap linksys router running dd-wrt works great. Never had to reset it and it's never gone down.
Firmware: DD-WRT v24 RC-5 (11/22/07) micro
Time: 10:06:43 up 187 days, 32 min, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Just logged into it because it's been so long, I couldn't remember was that linux firmware was called.
I try to avoid wireless at home. For my Wii and DS I got that Nintendo wireless adapter and diddled around with NDISwrapper and got it to work with my linux box somehow. It took a lot of messing around and I'm still not sure how I got it to work. It didn't work for a long time and one day it just decided to work when I plugged it back up to try again. There's probably a better way but hey, it's what I had and whatever, it works.
I personally like slackware, I've had friends argue that Freebsd or Ubuntu server is better but I could care less. I cut my teeth on slackware and that's probably what I'll stick with until they kill it. But I'm sure any 'nix distro would work just as great. Really it's not that much load on a system just to do a masquerade and file storage. It's nice having something sitting like that at home where I can access my stuff from anywhere in the world.
There are other things you can do with a home server like that and something I'm probable going to set up when I move.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.15758http://www.zoneminder.com/Thinking about doing that ever since some kids smashed my car up. That software will do stuff like that record only when it detects motion.
If the cameras shot lasers, then we'd be in business.
