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’ve known about it for years, but my router is loaned from the ISP so I can’t install any custom OS on it (although I’ve considered buying my own for a while because I can’t even do proper DNS for my internal network on it). A while back I used to have a router, but the default OS was enough for my needs so I also never considered installing anything different.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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 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
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
I’ve been using it for years and now I basically can’t live without it. I consider OpenWrt compatibility in all of my router purchases. Currently using a Netgear R7800 and a Belkin RT3200, both are going strong.
It isn’t as widely used because it can be finicky to flash sometimes, and that’s if it’s even compatible in the first place. Even if it works, you may experience a drop in performance unless OpenWrt supports using the routers hardware acceleration features. If there’s no support, OpenWrt basically uses the onboard CPU to do routing and they’re usually not all that powerful.
I’m also running a few R7800 with OpenWrt units and they’re really nice.
I know about it, but I prefer Asuswrt Merlin firmware for my routers, because I mainly use ASUS routers (powerful, modern (WiFi 6E etc) , easy to find second-hand models for cheap) and Merlin firmware is very well integrated with the routers and uses the same UI as the stock firmware, but provides additional features like a package manger etc.
In fact I believe ASUS themselves have started to use some of Merlin’s patches in their firmware, which goes to show how professional Merlin is.
(powerful, modern (WiFi 6E etc)
Interesting, I had no idea about this. Thanks for sharing! And it looks like there’s even an R4 with WiFi-7!
Yes, the R4 is the next thing, I’m not sure the wifi board is selling already and what’s the current state of the software. However I happen to have deployed a bunch of R3 boards (with metal case) with OpenWrt and they work amazingly good.
Got any links for the metal case?
I am aware of openwrt and used to use when I used router hardware. I have moved to pfsense. I install it on either a 1 liter mini PC or some other older enterprise piece of hardware.
I actually took some older now somewhat defunct google wifi pucks and got them all set up on openwrt not too long ago. Really enjoy having them on something with a dedicated web UI and perfectly nerdy
TIL there are Linux people that don’t use OpenWRT. I always assumed everyone in the Linux community used it. It’s great.
Works great with mt7621 based routers if anyone ends up looking for something compatible.
I run a proxmox and run PFsense on it. They are both pretty similar but there were more tutorials for PFsense at the time.
It’s a joy to use on x86 hardware though. You can run as many services as you want.
IMO, I’d run pf/opnsense on an x86 box, but openwrt on a low powered device…
Did that years ago with a pfSense firewall connected to the DSL modem, with OpenWrt APs around the house…until the hardware couldn’t support the next version of OpenWrt… (not enough RAM?)
Some people use pfSense/OPNsense
I was actually the lead engineer on an Openwrt router. I hadn’t heard of it before that, but at one point I pretty much knew it inside and out. It’s been a few years since I left that company, so I’m a bit rusty at this point.
We made tons of custom features for our router. I did the backend and implemented UIs for most of them. The biggest feature I did though was a full REST API to be able to configure the router from a smart home controller, which was the company’s main product. I did both the router side (server) and the smart home controller side (client/caller), including the UI on the smart home controller. I spent almost a year on just that feature. But I was damn proud of it by the end.
