61–70 of 123 posts
I have a TP-Link TL-WDR3600 v1 running OpenWRT. It was cheap, and works fine.
I have the Asus RT-AC68U/TM-AC1900. I bought it from T-Mobile for $60 and flashed it to stock and then put Asuswrt-Merlin on it (but you can use Tomato or DD-WRT). It does take a little work to flash it to stock (like Telnet'ing into the router), but it wasn't bad and for $60 I ended up with a wonderful router. There are guides online for flashing it back to stock. If you're looking for information, I suggest SmallNe…
I just replace my FIOS router with an ASUS RT-AC66U running AsusWRT-Merlin (I understand the stock firmware is based on Tomato). It is very fast, stable, has great coverage and is extremely configurable/hackable. I think I paid $75 for it from Amazon Warehouse Deals.
A router has nothing to do with providing WiFi. You should have a separate router and WAP. For the router, any fanless mini-PC with two ethernet ports. Run OpenBSD or pfSense.
I wonder, are there simple powerful just AP's comparable to the already mentioned routers? Just with less features...
For a router, I use openbsd and this guide: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13052673
The router is an AMD that runs almost any unix, so it is more or less immune to obsolescence due to lack of software updates (Linux and *BSD all have to abandon headless x86-64...)
Total cost was ~$300. The router was $200 of that and should last until my home internet connection is ~1GBit (OpenBSD probably can't NAT quite that quickly on that hardware--haven't measured it).
[edit: fixed asus model number]
if i were you, i would take an el cheapo j1900 intel box (from aliexpress) with quad lan ports and run pfsense on it. perhaps the best bang for buck configuration known to man!
I was looking at switching from ASUS on Merlin to Tomato for better QoS and to try out multi-WAN that was added in shibby about a year ago. I really want the internet to be reliable and fail over to a 2nd connection and then back fairly seamlessly.
Am I better off using pfSense (or something else) vs trying one of these integrated router/wireless firmwares?
Years ago I started looking for multi-WAN and got the very disappointing Linksys / Cisco RV042. It worked, but the interface was crap and it lacked a lot of the features that even consumer routers had. For an office of up to 50 people (and 2x devices) we've been using an ASUS RT-AC66R on Merlin and it's worked pretty well in that it's rock solid stable for many months at a time, has a bit of features - now including nice graphs for per-host bandwidth monitoring, and basic QoS and multi-WAN. The biggest issue is that QoS options are limited and it's hard to know if it's even working properly. The multi-WAN auto failover seems buggy and that seems like an area that Merlin hasn't touched.
I use two devices to handle usual definition of the router: 1. Mini PC[1] running as a router (pfSense); 2. eero to handle the wifi. Why? I've tried many times to use dd-wrt, openwrt and tomato firmwares on my routers, but every time I failed miserably: it's either something stops working, or I need to schedule routers reboots and so. So I gave up. Since that time, mini pc [1] is the third system which routes my traf…
I also use a MiniPC running pfSense and couldn't be happier. I made the switch 3 years ago, after running a Linksys WRT54G-TM on OpenWRT for 5+ years. pfSense is simple to get started with, powerful enough for small to medium businesses and "just works." The initial setup might be a bit more $$$ ($150 for hardware), but it will last you a long time.
I think the Turris Omnia ( https://omnia.turris.cz/en/ ) looks fantastic, and plan on getting one when my budget allows. On further (re)inspection though it seems you'd still be tied to your ISP's router/modem :( Perhaps there's a good standalone/mPCI modem out there somewhere?
Turris Omnia has a SFP port, so if your ISP has that option, you can get rid of your modem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found https://www.amazon.com/Qotom-Q190G4-Celeron-Processor-Barebo... a fantastic device for the price. There's a non-Atom Celeron, a Broadwell chip and four Intel LAN ports in a <$150 package without moving parts. My home is small so this also handles the wifi for me.
What OS you running on that?
I recently replaced my PC router running pfSense with an EdgeRouter X - at ~$50 the power savings alone will probably pay for it in less than a year, and the only thing I can't do with it that I could do with pfSense is create a standalone OpenVPN endpoint - so I'm moving that functionality to a server that was running anyway.