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As far as what to do with it, I could picture house-wide ad/tracker blocking, sending traffic analytics to elastic, potentially some homeassistant/rtlsdr type stuff.
Need a quick primer on the differences between various current flavors of open router firmware.
There are other firmwares for plastic, and it used to be that some of them (like DD-WRT and Tomato) would just work better than OpenWrt on a small number of devices. Today, I suspect some of them still have merits that arguably make it worth not just doing OpenWrt, but I'll defer to someone more familiar with them to discuss those merits.
If you want to be better respected on /r/homelab, or not use a SoC, then get PC hardware (or a turnkey appliance) and pfSense or OPNsense. You might end up getting separate plastic WiFi APs (perhaps running OpenWrt), and doing only Ethernet on the router box itself (pfSense suggests this).
You can also make your own router/firewall/appliance, by just configuring a PC GNU/Linux distro manually. Extra gigabit NICs come on PCIe cards.
Let me grab this occassion: is there a Elecom WRH-583BK2-S sized similarly dual RJ45 dual band router -- with OpenWRT compatibility? https://twitter.com/ysks/status/773135671057784833/photo/1 it is not OpenWRT compatible. Specs at https://twitter.com/ysks/status/773141289197981696
Running DD-WRT on my router, currently. Would people tend to recommend OpenWRT, these days? I haven't been in the loop WRT open router firmwares in a while...
Yes DD-WRT remains a hacky codebase with several things breaking all the time. I'm aure some people are running it just fine though. It also uses close-source drivers for some equipment. Last time I tried it on an Archer C7v2, the 5ghz didn't work properly.
How is the UX story on OpenWRT these days? I have an Archer C7 running stock FW in my basement that keeps acting up, and my default would be just to flash DD-WRT. I'm not opposed to a little bit of CLI fiddling, but I definitely also like my router to be a set and forget type of device. As far as what to do with it, I could picture house-wide ad/tracker blocking, sending traffic analytics to elastic, potentially some…
I have openwrt on all my 3 Archer C7s.
I much prefer it to dd-wrt.
What exactly are the benefits of having Openwrt installed on your router? What additional functionality does it provide the average HN user?
What exactly are the benefits of having Openwrt installed on your router? What additional functionality does it provide the average HN user?
May be the updated drivers or the removed junk, but WiFi, NAT and USB speeds are better on all the routers I had (my first step - install Openwrt, DD-wrt or Tomato). And no latency spikes.
Lots of configuration options, extra capabilities via packages, and it can run for months without losing speed, losing the connection, becoming non-responsive or rebooting.
I choose my routers based on if they are supported or not by OpenWrt. And for everybody that asks my opinion, too. Because they might not need/want/know/have a desire to install OpenWrt now, but it's good to have the door open for the future.
How is the UX story on OpenWRT these days? I have an Archer C7 running stock FW in my basement that keeps acting up, and my default would be just to flash DD-WRT. I'm not opposed to a little bit of CLI fiddling, but I definitely also like my router to be a set and forget type of device. As far as what to do with it, I could picture house-wide ad/tracker blocking, sending traffic analytics to elastic, potentially some…
One thing to know is that the overall documentation situation is "mixed", and if you Google for how to do something with OpenWrt, you'll often find very old notes someone wrote about how to do something with the command line and editing files. (I know Linux pretty well, have used OpenWrt for years including some complex setups, and occasionally I have trouble finding documentation of simple things like, e.g., what partitions/mounts are currently volatile, for example, and distro-specifics of where you're supposed to edit packet filtering rules.) There's not enough correcting of that scattered documentation, such as to say that almost everyone just uses the Web admin interface now. When in doubt, just look at what the Web admin UI currently does, and try to use that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes DD-WRT remains a hacky codebase with several things breaking all the time. I'm aure some people are running it just fine though. It also uses close-source drivers for some equipment. Last time I tried it on an Archer C7v2, the 5ghz didn't work properly.
Thank you. I did some digging and my router, the Asus RT-AC68U C1, being Broadcom-based, has no working WiFi. Guess I'll stay put.
(I did not install it, because the model I have has fallen out of the supported hardware list a while ago, but it'd be great to hear how well it does for anyone else.)