Linksys WRT54G2 Wireless-G Broadband Router Immediately

This G wireless router is all I need for my house. Covers the whole house and patio/deck in back yard well (I don't care about coverage beyond that). The speed is much faster than my cable modem, so a faster (N protocol) router would not really help much.

My only complaint is the DHCP server. On my old wireless B Netgear router, I could go into the router configuration web page and tell it to always give a certain MAC address the same IP address via DHCP. That was nice because I could just set the machine to use DHCP to keep up with any changes, such as DNS servers, that my ISP makes. I could then set up simple host files to map host names to a fixed IP, which for file transfers, printing, etc... makes things easier. This router does NOT have this simple feature. Linux can be configured to use a static IP, but still get the DNS from DHCP. For Red Hat based systems, look at /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. The graphical network configuration tool does not have that option, but it can be set using the configuration file. Windows can not, at least that I could see, be configured to do that. For Windows, I guess the best bet is to use DHCP and set host name resolution to use wins, but that does not work for everything. A laptop computer that goes between work and home really needs to use DHCP. For printers, the IP must be set from the buttons on the printer. Anyway, there are some ways to work around it, but it would have been so much simpler if they just had a mechanism in the router to always give each machine the same IP address from the DHCP server.

Perhaps if the fine folks Linksys / Cisco have some specific recommendations to this problem, they should share them. I spent several hours searching the Internet for solutions. There are lots of people complaining about this in the online forums, but few solution and nothing on any Linksys / Cisco web page that addresses this basic problem. Are their heads in the sand on this? I'm no marketing expert, but I'd think that if they want to sale these routers that they should post solutions to known short comings rather than ignoring the fact that the router does not have a feature that customers need.Get more detail about Linksys WRT54G2 Wireless-G Broadband Router.