With the demise of the Airport, I got around to the LinkSys router project.
I followed the basic instructions in the LifeHacker piece and the firmware upgrade actually worked.
The main thing I found useful? I couldn’t use Safari to work with the web interface (and yes, manly command-line types, you’re stuck with that to start with): it won’t work with the UI for some reason. You can’t get any changes to stick once you submit them. A bit maddening . . . Firefox is fine.
But as a replacement for the Airport, I think it will work. The next phase is to make it share/manage all traffic, wired and wireless. It seems plenty capable. And the aftermarket firmware versions support snmp.
Still have to work out why ssh doesn’t work for me. [update] Apparently, it doesn’t matter what you change the admin username to in the web UI, you still have to use ‘root’ as the username.
But this is a good start.