OpenWrt 23.05 • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenWrt 23.05

#11

Post by alibert » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 2:02 PM UTC

Caution advised for people jumping early, the Release Candidate 4 was released only ~10 days ago and didn't have the usual long testing period (usually month). More, the devs introduced major refactors late in the release cycle.

RC4 changelog includes bump to major components, most notably: hostapd, ucode, ubus, netifd.

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/openwrt-23-05-0-rc4-fourth-relea...

Re: OpenWrt 23.05

#12

Post by Mister_Snuggles » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 2:10 PM UTC

OpenWrt is incredible.

My USG-3P died a few months ago, so I dusted off my old Asus router and made an unplanned switch to OpenWrt. This was meant to be a temporary solution until I could get a new UniFi device, but after setting it up and getting it working the way I want I'm more than happy to make this temporary solution into a permanent one.

Re: OpenWrt 23.05

#13

Post by diggan » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 2:10 PM UTC

alibert wrote: post #11

Caution advised for people jumping early, the Release Candidate 4 was released only ~10 days ago and didn't have the usual long testing period (usually month). More, the devs introduced major refactors late in the release cycle. RC4 changelog includes bump to major components, most notably: hostapd, ucode, ubus, netifd. https://forum.openwrt.org/t/openwrt-23-05-0-rc4-fourth-relea...

Is that common in OpenWrt to introduce more changes between RC versions? Usually you want to stabilize everything as much as possible until the final version been released, but seems they continue to push out RCs as standard updates...

Re: OpenWrt 23.05

#14

Post by cjdell » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 2:11 PM UTC

OpenWRT is great for taking bargain routers on eBay (which can be had for as little as £5 and yet have fast CPUs and support modern WiFi radios) and making them into proper homelab gateways with VPN, VLANs, DNS proxies etc. I would often do this for friends who wanted VPN access to their home network but didn't want to fork out for a router that would offer this out of the box. I would find it amusing when an ISP's stock firmware would turn out to just be an OpenWRT skin.

Re: OpenWrt 23.05

#15

Post by Ecco » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

cjdell wrote: post #14

OpenWRT is great for taking bargain routers on eBay (which can be had for as little as £5 and yet have fast CPUs and support modern WiFi radios) and making them into proper homelab gateways with VPN, VLANs, DNS proxies etc. I would often do this for friends who wanted VPN access to their home network but didn't want to fork out for a router that would offer this out of the box. I would find it amusing when an ISP's s…

Would you recommend any specific model for such “bargain routers”?

Re: OpenWrt 23.05

#16

Post by cjdell » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

Ecco wrote: post #15

cjdell wrote: post #14

OpenWRT is great for taking bargain routers on eBay (which can be had for as little as £5 and yet have fast CPUs and support modern WiFi radios) and making them into proper homelab gateways with VPN, VLANs, DNS proxies etc. I would often do this for friends who wanted VPN access to their home network but didn't want to fork out for a router that would offer this out of the box. I would find it amusing when an ISP's s…

Would you recommend any specific model for such “bargain routers”?

My goto for a while was the BT HomeHub 5A (not B variant). Just checked and these are available for £10 on eBay if you're based in the UK. I'm sure there are bargains to be had all over the world. The place to start is to look at OpenWRT's supported devices page and look for ISP branded models. These are often flogged on eBay super cheap when people move because they're basically scrap to most people. I'm sure even more just go in the bin (sadly).

Re: OpenWrt 23.05

#17

Post by sandreas » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 2:21 PM UTC

Ecco wrote: post #15

cjdell wrote: post #14

OpenWRT is great for taking bargain routers on eBay (which can be had for as little as £5 and yet have fast CPUs and support modern WiFi radios) and making them into proper homelab gateways with VPN, VLANs, DNS proxies etc. I would often do this for friends who wanted VPN access to their home network but didn't want to fork out for a router that would offer this out of the box. I would find it amusing when an ISP's s…

Would you recommend any specific model for such “bargain routers”?

I use an old Asus RT-N56U for great (Gigabit) switching performance. Wifi is only N, and you have to be careful, there are two HW revisions, that are indistinguishable from the outside. An alternative could be different TP Link devices, but I never tested these.

For more modern purposes I use a Linksys WRT32X with divested[1] image, but you could also go for the 1900 or even 1200, depending on your needs...

Maybe also take a look here: https://www.libe.net/openwrt-devices

[1] https://divested.dev/unofficial-openwrt-builds/mvebu-linksys...

Re: OpenWrt 23.05

#18

Post by HeckFeck » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 2:39 PM UTC

Ecco wrote: post #15

cjdell wrote: post #14

OpenWRT is great for taking bargain routers on eBay (which can be had for as little as £5 and yet have fast CPUs and support modern WiFi radios) and making them into proper homelab gateways with VPN, VLANs, DNS proxies etc. I would often do this for friends who wanted VPN access to their home network but didn't want to fork out for a router that would offer this out of the box. I would find it amusing when an ISP's s…

Would you recommend any specific model for such “bargain routers”?

I've had good results with both D-Link routers (DIR-615??, DIR-842) I've owned through the years - the DIR-615 was bought used, it lasted 8 years of constant service, was only replaced because I needed 802.11n and a better WAN port. It still works when I plug it in! Its replacement DIR-842 has been chugging happily since 2021 and was also purchased second-hand.

Re: OpenWrt 23.05

#19

Post by jvolkman » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 2:39 PM UTC

OpenWrt is commonly used to breathe new (or better) life into consumer routers, but you can also run it on any x86 machine. I run it on a small, passively-cooled i5 machine* virtualized in Proxmox alongside Home Assistant. I originally ran OPNSense, then VyOS, but eventually went back to OpenWRT since it does everything I want/need with a simple interface.

* https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/hzvfih/new_router_...

Re: OpenWrt 23.05

#20

Post by orthoxerox » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 2:49 PM UTC

Ecco wrote: post #15

cjdell wrote: post #14

OpenWRT is great for taking bargain routers on eBay (which can be had for as little as £5 and yet have fast CPUs and support modern WiFi radios) and making them into proper homelab gateways with VPN, VLANs, DNS proxies etc. I would often do this for friends who wanted VPN access to their home network but didn't want to fork out for a router that would offer this out of the box. I would find it amusing when an ISP's s…

Would you recommend any specific model for such “bargain routers”?

The biggest bargain routers I've used all come from Xiaomi, but you need to check their pages on the OpenWRT wiki very carefully, because there are very similar models with very different compatibility stories.

Flashing them is always fun, because their stock GUI is in Chinese and you do this by looking at it through one of the camera translator apps on your phone.