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 mean, what does one have to do to replace an ISP owned router and what are the benefits? How much does one have to know in order to setup a connection? How does one get connection details from the ISP owned router? How much does a replacement router cost?
My ISP owned router allows me to configure NAT forwarding, replace the DNS, setup a DMZ, assign static IPs to MACs, turn off the internet at specific times (e.g at night), configure parental controls (allows websites, internet access) per device, and probably a few other things I haven’t discovered yet.
Most the things you mentioned are barely doable on some of the modern all in one modems where I live.
On mine I’ve got separate wi-fi networks for inside and guest, I run zenarmor for ads and malicious junk, I run a proxy, I do my DNS on it for all my internal docker instances, and more. I realize I am doing more than your average person, though.
You can run a VPN like wire guard, ad blockers such as Adguard Home or pihole or even media servers on your openwrt router.
I see. Well, I have a homeserver for that, which runs all my services, so an openwrt router wouldn’t be an upgrade.
But probably without a homeserver, an openwrt router would make sense and use less energy.
If you mean a DSL modem or cable DOCSIS, I don’t think those are easily replaceable. But you can definitely put an OpenWRT device right behind it and use that. It’s pretty straightforward (plug in the upstream side, wait for it to get an address, done).
As for how much you need to know… okay. That’s a tricky question because, the most you mess with OpenWRT, the more some stuff becomes automatic, and that makes it easy to forget things. That’s not on you, that’s on me.
That said, thinking about it a little, the defaults are pretty workable right after installation. You’ll have to set an admin password on the OpenWRT box (it nags you until you do these days), which should be familiar. Turning up wifi is a little tricky at first. I would recommend reading through the quickstart guide once or twice before digging into OpenWRT configuration because it lays out all of the basics that you need to get going. It’s about as well written and useful as the manuals for access points were way back when.
One thing I would recommend is, if you build an OpenWRT box, setting it up before you plug it in and use it as your network gateway. It’s much easier to poke at it without having “When is my network going to come back up?” rattling around in the back of your mind.
For my ISP it’s actually cheaper to not use their modem+WiFi router as they charge a monthly lease on the equipment. I declined it and they provided me with a modem for free. All I have to do is plug the modem to my own router and that’s it!
The features you listed seems pretty standard to all routers these days.
The features you listed seems pretty standard to all routers these days.
You and @yeehaw@lemmy.world have very different experiences 😄
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.
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.
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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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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.
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 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.
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
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 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.
Installed OpenWRT on my NetGear router like 2 years back, and it didn’t give me any trouble since then. BTW, the amount of configuration options it offer is mindbogglingly.
Just the capacity for network monitoring for troubleshooting makes it worthwhile. Not being able to SSH into Netgear’s firmware, let alone having access to tcpdump is an advantage right there.
I do know about it, but I don’t even have internet at home.
Though I do use DD-WRT on my WRT160NL which I use at school. For me it acts as firewall + setup-free VPN + DNS Ad blocker (NextDNS). I also have separate passwordless guest network on it if someone wants to use my router. Separate subnet, unbridged with net isolation and AP isolation enabled. And also QoS set to “Bulk” while my network is set to “Maximum”. And also forced DNS redirection enabled, so that everyone who doesn’t use DoT or DoH uses NextDNS.It cannot run modern versions of OpenWRT.
You really want to either update to a supported release or stop using it entirely. It is very insecure to run network equipment with known security issues
It is still much more secure than to stop using it and let your other devices go naked.
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 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.
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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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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.
Some people use pfSense/OPNsense
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?)
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.
