I’ve noticed a few prosumer type devices are now on the market.
Man after my experience with linksys I almost didn’t ever bother with openwrt or anything to do with flashing a router ever again. Glad to stumble upon this thread and see others recommending glinet. Definitely the way to go if you want openwrt compatibility out of the box without all the fucking around.
I have had a create experience with OpenWRT on Linksys. It probably just depends on the device and chipset.
What was your experience? I’ve had two Linksys WRT routers running OpenWRT for 9 years and 7 years respectively, with several software upgrades in that time, and I’ve never had a problem.
Sorry for the delayed reply. I had a wrt3200x. I think a couple of years later they were acquired. One of the wifi radios had a driver issue that pretty much never got resolved because no one within linksys was willing to fix it on their end because it was a couple years old (and pre acquisition product).
I also nearly went insane learning about VLANs whilst trying to implement them with this router. Which was required by my ISP. A couple really weird issues that I ended up spending way too much time on my end trying to fix. Nearly put me off openwrt tbh but eventually I realised it was a firmware issue. Radio issue was similar or related to mwlwifi or something.
Thank god that model specifically had dual bios (amazingly handy feature) until I eventually even bricked that and couldn’t be bother fixing it via serial port.
Yes, recently I wanted to upgrade my router and then noticed glinet flint2, this is fucking great, I can flash stock openwrt through vendor webui and vice versa
I like the r4s nanopi. Although the manufacturer has their own distribution of openwrt, it does not come preinstalled, and you can use the release directly from openwrt. Because it has a removable flash memory card it’s much easier to install as you don’t have to worry about bricking things
Is open source router firmware a huge upgrade from a functionality and security perspective over standard vendor-issue firmware? Migrating has always been on the todo list, but I fear just following a web how-to won’t be enough, and a certain level of networking knowledge is required.
My needs are pretty basic: main network, guest network, and a method for work device isolation aka Windows containment (perhaps a VLAN is what I’m after).
@Tregetour @possiblylinux127 so that’s the nice thing about open wrt is they have an x86 distro. So you can run on any old computer and get to know it and learn to love it as much as everybody else does.
I think once you’ve done it a few times it’s not too scary. Then you can really enjoy the process it’s like opening the same present over and over but it just keeps getting better.
Just seen your comment and I can deffo comment as to the security aspect of it.
I bought a Xiaomi AX3600 with the knowledge that I could flash OpenWRT on it, but before doing so and using the stock firmware I came across this with
apthaving its hash mismatched when downloading “only over ethernet” which usually infers someone is doing something bad on your networkhttps://stackoverflow.com/questions/72022569/cannot-find-fixes-to-apt-error-hash-sum-mismatch
This guy said they replaced their whole router and should really ping them to ask.
Suffice to say that “bug” went away when I flashed OpenWRT and someone should probably look into more detail why, that was happening…
I’m using FreshTomato at the moment on an old nighthawk router. I want to upgrade but I’m waiting til I see more about the BPI-R4.
