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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Yes. It saved me from crappy firmware on my expensive router. It’s a must if you care about security of your home network and devices.
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’ve been using OpenWRT as a hobbyist for over 15 years, and as a professional for over 6 years. Extremely underrated OS.
A vanilla install beats any stock router firmware by leaps and bounds. From there you can add pretty much any functionality you desire.
I currently use a Turris Omnia router made by CZ.NIC, who also maintains their own OpenWRT based distro called Turris OS.
About a million years ago, back in 2007/2008 that is, there was this small company called Hexago that did R&D in IPv6 networking, they were behind the Frenet6 project and created the networking stack and the TSP client that would let you tunnel a /56 IPv6 network over a dynamic IPv4 connection.
One the projects was a tiny hardware router, I honestly forget who made it, but Hexago would buy them, then we would flash each one with WRT+TSP client custom image, the idea was you plug this in your network and you have IPv6 connection in your network without doing any magic configuration.
It worked well until we lost finding.
So yeah, OpenWRT is old and not just for Linksys routers :)
I used dd-wrt for a few years, but I realized I didn’t need it as my new router have the functionality I want. I also realized my router had much better throughput with the stock firmware.
I personally use it on a protectli with the 2.5G ports. I also replaced my ISP modern with a protectli running OpnSense. Decided to opt into that as my solution to have two different softwares protecting my network and also so I could scope internet facing devices at the OpnSense level instead of internal to the network. Just in case they get compromised, they can’t access the rest of the network. Call me paranoid… But I also find it much easier to manage lol.
I’ve used it and dd-wrt back in the day on cheap crashy routers. Also Tomato.
Haven’t tried it in a long time, but have an EAP225 v2 and v3 I’ve been considering slapping openwrt on.
I’ve been debating buying a cheap aliexpress mini 2.5G router pc and doing something of the sort. But I have been too lazy to look into if I can still use my orbis as access points. Maybe tonight’s the night.
Yes, I love it. My router is an x86 mini PC running Open WRT, then I have two routers acting as WAPs also running OpenWRT.
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 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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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LOL same here
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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It is not normal for it to just stop working
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Not at all what?
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Stable? In my experience OpenWRT is very stable. Can you share the hardware and software you were using?
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