before buying expensive routers check OpenWRT’s table of hardware and buy one that is supported by the current OpenWRT release and has decent specs. There is a detailed installation guide for each supported device in the wiki too so there are no excuses it’s dead simple. Free yourself from stupid hardware manufacturers and their planed obsolescence products.
- Edit: also here is the new version of the table of hardware with more details They seem to have buyers guide too in the wiki.
- Edit2: seems like GL.iNet devices ship with OpenWRT out of the box with their GUI on top and you still have access to openwrt under the hood if you need it which sounds awesome so look into them if you’re interested. Thanks you guys who brought them up.
- Edit3: there is firewall sulotion called OPNSense which is not limited to commercial routers like OpenWRT and can be run on any x86 hardware of your choice (like N100 mini pcs) so look into it if you’re interested. Many thanks to the guys who contributed in the comments
- Edit4: Sorry for the multiple edits but some of you guys suggest some fantastic insights that I had to add. Anyways here is a list of good candidate devices for hassle free installation and yet powerful enough hardware from OpenWRT’s Forum
- I promise it’s gonna be the last Edit. OpenWRT has a official device they made themselves called OpenWRT ONE (I think the second one is also in the works). It hase good specs for home network and you support the project too. Here is the link to official Retailers
Also powerful but I reckon if you’re at this level then you already know about it; https://opnsense.org/
As a matter of fact I heard about them but I don’t know much about OPNSense. Do they support devices other than ones they sell? They seem to be rather about professional environment not home network am right?
It supports any x86 device you throw at it. I’m running it on a hodgepodge PC I built out of scrap.
Damn I’m sold next step I gonna look into them
I use it too in a VM, but this doesn’t support being installed on routers, right?
It doesn’t support being flashed to a low-end commercial router like you’d do with OpenWrt, no. Those tend to require special firmware and binary blobs, hence OpenWrt has to specifically support a model or it likely won’t work. It’s like flashing Android ROMs.
OpnSense is great if you’re in the market for totally owning your own router, though. You can get an N100 box with 2 NICs off of ebay or something and slap OpnSense on that. That’s arguably more FOSS than flashing OpenWrt to a cheap commercial router.
Mikrotik with RouterOS for European-made router without chinese backdoor
This. I cringe whenever I see someone using an ASUS or TPLINK.
I honestly don’t know much about Microtik’s RouterOS but in a few occasions I had I realised it is way too complicated for home user and their OS is not FOSS and needs payed license too. I’m sure it’s great once you get the hang of it but it’s unnecessary pain when there is OpenWRT available with a lot of devices you can choose not just one specific manufacturer
I disagree. Your machine should be setup such that you don’t have to trust the network that you connect to.
I don’t recommend GL.inet routers. I have the Marble and it is slower than my ISPs router. It has a thing called network hardware acceleration, and it breaks my home server. Services just stop working well with it. So I keep it turned off. When I reported the issue they said it is working for them and came up with a completely hypotical setup…
With AdGuard enabled it frequently froze and I had to reboot it. For some reason even without AdGuard name resolution is noticeably slower. Doesn’t matter if I use my ISP’s DNS or not.
Also, DynDNS doesn’t support custom names, so I installed an alternative service for mywire.org.
Overally, this box came with drawbacks, but no doubt about it is hackable in the good way.
I would like to try openwrt’s own router, next time.
How does DD-WRT fare? I’ve been using that, but I only have old routers. I mean, old. But I only have mobile data, so they’re mostly for playing around. Except for the one which supports Wireguard in DD-WRT. That’s very useful as a client. Unfortunately, it’s also the least stable one, rebooting every few minutes and eventually ending up in a bootloop after 1 to 2 hours.
I’ve got I think 8 routers now, 6 of them have Wi-Fi, 1 has 802.11n (the unstable one), the rest peaks with 802.11g.
Sorry I don’t know much about DD-WRT to be honest. I myself have a Google WiFi mesh pack of three devices which I bought second hand for about 30$. They are excellent value in my opinion so maybe look into that if you’re interested
