WRT54G
As Jason noted, we installed OpenWRT on his WRT54G. It was a lot smoother than we expected, and our style of tag-team configuration -- closely resembling pair programming, as Jason pointed out -- really shone. As one person would run into a roadblock, another would swoop in and bang on it a bit. It's really quite a fun environment to get things running.
As for the device itself, I'm quite impressed. It's a 802.11G AP, NAT box, and 4 port switch all in one. And it runs Linux. You can ssh in and change firewall rules with iptables. By comparison, at my house we have 3 pieces of hardware to do the same things. Granted, we have a bit more flexibility, and our NAT box runs OpenBSD. But I think I would give up that flexbility for a significantly smaller and simpler footprint. Oh yeah, and it was cheaper than the combined price of all the stuff we bought (even if all the stuff was bought now, instead of a few years ago).
As for the device itself, I'm quite impressed. It's a 802.11G AP, NAT box, and 4 port switch all in one. And it runs Linux. You can ssh in and change firewall rules with iptables. By comparison, at my house we have 3 pieces of hardware to do the same things. Granted, we have a bit more flexibility, and our NAT box runs OpenBSD. But I think I would give up that flexbility for a significantly smaller and simpler footprint. Oh yeah, and it was cheaper than the combined price of all the stuff we bought (even if all the stuff was bought now, instead of a few years ago).