For the longest time I’ve used an AirPort Extreme as my gateway router. When I moved to the US, I purchased an Airport Extreme 5th Generation and it worked well. It tied in with a Mac Mini Server I purchased at the time and the Mac OS X Server application integrated nicely with the device to handle port forwarding. I also set up Cacti in a Linux VM to monitor this device over SNMP and that worked reasonably well. Then Apple redesigned the AirPort Utility to become a much simpler interface. A lot of the settings and control that used to be there disappeared with the version 6 release. AirPort Utility 5.6 provided extra details like logs and a list of wireless clients with their relative connection strength. For a while I continued on using Airport Utility 5.6 with various levels of hacks to keep it working. Somewhere along the line I also ended up picking up a 6th Generation Airport Extreme to play with the 802.11ac support and found that it lacked many of the features like SNMP that the 5th generation supported. In a recent move I ended up coming across the 6th generation first, unpacked it and set it up as my main gateway but was disappointed by the lack of introspection into the device which put me on the path of looking at pfSense.
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