What routers and NAS devices do support stock Linux?
OpenWRT is nice but stock Linux support (Debian for example) would be even nicer.

An inexpensive ITX board with CPU and multiple LAN boards would do the job as well.

How many network segments do you need? 2 or 3 is pretty easy with cheap ITX boards. Additional ports are better left to a switch.

I use this for my router/webserver/iSCSI target:
http://ca.gigabyte.com/products/product ... x?pid=4497

For just a router it is overkill, it's very fast for how cheap it is and it has two NICs built in. I actually have multiple network segments, but I use VLANs instead of extra NICs. For 2 or 3 (with a cheap PCI card) networks without VLANs it works great. Or you could put a wireless card in the PCI slot.

What sort of usage scenario do you have that needs this kind of router? Might be worth understanding what your needs are first.

One use case would be as a normal home router, another would be as a router shared by 16 students on a 25/25 line.

A 'normal' computer would work fine but I'd prefer to keep the cost (and complexity and size) down.

Neither of those use cases is particularity demanding. Pretty much anything but the lowest end bottom of the barrel routers would work fine.

Why the Linux requirement? For your use cases the OS is pretty much irrelevant.

IMO stock router firmwares generally suck. Stability is bad, feature set is weak, etc.
For example, most routers don't allow you to see who's consuming how much bandwidth.
Most don't support fair bandwidth sharing / scheduling.
And I just like having full control over the software.

Well that is a bit more than just a basic router then.

Home routers that are unstable are caused by crappy hardware or not enough memory. Neither of those will be solved by a full Linux distro and for memory would likely be worse. The better ones run Linux anyway with the same routing you would be using in a full distro. Some of the better ones have QoS in the stock firmware, again using the same code a full distro would use.

If you want true bandwidth limiting and not just QoS then you will likely need to go full PC, or at least something more powerful than a home router. Linux can do it, but it would be better with FreeBSD or OpenBSD. pfSense is a complete FreeBSD "distro" made specifically for use as a router and has bandwidth limiting.

I fully understand the desire to have full control. I personally run stock FreeBSD on my router, not even pfSense. The C1007UN I suggested before is definitely overkill, but there is not much that is significantly cheaper and still has 2 NICs.

Yes, but what's your point?

Are you saying crappy software can't be the cause?

My point is that you didn't state your requirements clearly.

We are talking about routers that run Linux. OpenWRT vs Debian doesn't matter, it is the same code doing the important routing part and it is all kernel code.

QNAP NAS run a fairly recent linux kernel, I think it is debian derived. I had no problems running various tools and software on them.