I have many nerdy friends who have been Linux users for ages. But most of them don’t know such a thing as Openwrt exists or have never bothered to give it a try. It’s a very fun piece of software to play with and can be extremely useful for routing traffic. Wondering why it isn’t more popular/widely used.
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I use OpenWRT on my Linksys WRT3200ACM because I used to have a cable connection that suffered from bufferbloat. The SQM feature made a huge improvement. I eventually switched to a fiber connection from a different ISP which does not suffer from bufferbloat, but I kept OpenWRT on my router.
I used it before, but ultimately it comes down to compatibility. Broadcomm is dominating the router space and 3rd party firmwares are a nono for that. So I just got an Asus that is supposed to be supported for a very long time.
Yeah I run it on a cheap asus router. Learned stuff like don’t run adguard on it if you don’t have that much ram
Run it on a cheap fanless x86 box instead.
I bought a router with OpenWRT support but the official firmware works well enough and I can’t really be bothered to switch it out for OpenWRT right now lol
it’s good to know that I can in the future though, that wasn’t an option with my last router
I remember getting a LinkSyS WRT54G for free and then installing OpenRT and then jumping to Tomato and dd-wrt on and off and finally setting on dd-wrt
Fine on limited hardware like a router but if you’re going to use a full box for your router (or a VM), you’d probably want OPNsense for the ease of management and the fact that it’s targetted for hardware like that.
No, for home I’ve only ever used pfsense or opnsense.
I know about it. It’s pretty popular, so much in fact that you can buy a wide range of routers with it preinstalled.
I only know one company that sells routers with openwrt pre-installed. It’s called Gl-inet.
Make that two, Turris also sells them, though technically it’s a fork of OpenWrt with some stuff on top. I have one myself (though I’m not running the original OS).
Turris looks very good. Thanks.
Make that 3! There’s Sinovoip (aka Banana Pi). https://www.banana-pi.org/en/bananapi-router/.
The BananaPi BPi R3 and here is a very good option with a 4 core CPU, 2GB of RAM Wifi6 and two 2.5G SFP ports besides the 4 ethernet ports. There’s also an upcoming board the BPI-R4 with optional Wifi 7 and 10G SPF.
Yup. Running it on my home router, right now. It is awesome. A tiny, stripped down OS that you can install minimal packages on. Like a VPN client, or ad-blockers. If your router is compatible, I cannot suggest it enough.
Also, my router’s manufacturer had the gall to ask (force) me to sign up and get an ID with them in order to get to the back-end of my own router. Jesus Christ, privacy red flag much?
I could not install OpenWRT fast enough.
I used to use it, then wanted more control, power, and commission so I moved to pfSense, and later on to Opnsense where I am today.
Made the same journey over the years. Rocking a OPNsense DEC740 now and everything works well.
@mfat@lemdro.id
I use openwrt, it’s my main router running on proxmox, working perfectly.In my experience it’s because it’s finicky as fuck and requires very specific (and often more expensive) router models, and even then it still crashes just as much as a proprietary os router.
You can run it on a raspberry pi or an x86 mini pc.
sure, and then you have to make sure you get the correct radio accessories, as the built in pi wifi isn’t going to do so hot acting as the hotspot for multiple video streaming devices.
Radios which you also have to vet against the approved hardware list for OpenWRT, and having multiple channels is even more of an issue with the lack of USB ports (depending on model)
Best thing to do is to get a fanless mini PC with multiple ethernet ports and hook up a decent access point to one of those ports.
Then you’re still looking at a mess of devices and a relatively power hungry system plus you still have your ISPs modem
I need my Internet for work, so I just replaced my ISPs modem with a FritzBox, which is not ideal, but serves me well, gets updates for quite a while and works pretty much always.
then you should get a commercial router compatible with openwrt
Or, I keep using my Fritzbox, which is a single device and does everything I want.
As far as I know, there is no cable modem/router integrated device.
the option i suggested is also a single device.
most commercial routers can run openwrt. you dont need a specialized device.
i run it on the cheapest 5ghz router i could find
LOL same here
You can run it on used hardware from the landfill. As long as it has more than 32mb of ram and no broadcom you are good.
You can find old hardware for free if you go dumpster diving. If that isn’t an option you can pickup a device for $100 USD
Interesting. I have heard of it but so far I didnt bother since my router is quite versatile.
My biggest fear is that it borks itself and I sit there at 10 pm on movie night without a network or internet to troubleshoot.
If if I chose to use it I would need to have the current router as a fallback either running 24/7 or on a dead man switch.
It is not normal for it to just stop working
not at all.
Not at all what?
take a guess
Stable? In my experience OpenWRT is very stable. Can you share the hardware and software you were using?
Some routers have dual partition setup.
Active and backup. When flashing firmware, it is flashed to the backup partition. If the router boots successfully, the newly flashed backup partition becomes active and vice versa. If things screw up, nothing happens.
Thanks for the info. Thats not exactly what I meant. I‘m not afraid of the router itself breaking at installation but freezing for example and not being able to reboot. I usually dont tinker with mission critical stuff.
The same thing can happen to manufacturer firmware. Only you’d have much less capability to troubleshoot, let alone fix it.
True but manufacturers are in big trouble if stuff like this breaks where I live so they are very eager to provide such service and additionally, the brand my router is from is generally considered rather good.
Not USian, I’m guessing?
Exactly.
Gotcha. Very different in the States in this regard.
been running it for years now, no weird sudden stability problems whatsoever.
OpenWrt was relatively popular back in the day when Linksys routers could run Linux. At some point iirc Linksys sadly replaced the default Linux based firmware by a closed source OS, and also decreased the amount of memory for the firmware. A few years ago I saw that there was an option to install OpenWrt in an lxc container, I briefly played with it, nice nostalgia.
I buy Linksys because it works well with OpenWRT and is cheap
There was also some interesting thing from Cisco with their stupid Meraki cloud-managed devices.
I don’t know if they still do it, but they used to give out free Meraki APs as “free trial”. After that, the license would be deactivated and you’d be left with a paperweight, which meant you’d likely pay to keep using it.
Well, they could run OpenWRT. Free hardware!Nowadays you can easily run it on a single board computer like the raspberry pi or any x86 mini pcs. You just need to hook up an access point for Wi-Fi which doesn’t need to be able to run openwrt.
SBCs aren’t routers, while they’re great they might not be good for people who actually want to have WAN and LAN and decent networking performance. Routers usually include some switch chip that will do most of the heavy networking operations, handle VLANs and whatnot without adding CPU load.
@mfat @lemmyreader it’s a really nice firewall router too with every feature you’d want
I use pfsense now at workLinksys luckily still sells OpenWRT specific routers.
I’ve long known about it. I don’t seriously use it, but I would if only my Wi-Fi router was fully supported. It’s an Asus one (that I got for free from T-Mobile a decade ago) so I installed Asuswrt-Merlin on it instead.
Following the recommendation of homelab communities, I got into OpnSense (a BSD-based firewall system for x86 hardware only) last year, still keeping my Wi-Fi router as a dedicated AP. In hindsight I somewhat regret that choice and probably would’ve been better off buying a new OpenWRT-compatible router and using it to handle firewall/routing/AP all in one device instead of wasting the power draw of another separate N100 system. I like having wireguard and vnstat in my router now, which Merlin didn’t offer, but I know OpenWRT has those too and I don’t have any other needs that warrant a higher-power router.
