Other routers have run OpenWRT straight from the factory before (various GL.iNet devices come to mind, not to mention the OG Linksys WRT54G – it may not have been called “OpenWRT” as such, but OpenWRT descends from that firmware).
In what way is this device “designed specifically” for OpenWRT that those were not?
Linksys WRT54G
The Linksys WRT54G did not run OpenWrt by default and the original OS does not even remotely resemble OpenWrt. What OpenWrt did use from the original OS was the Broadcom wireless driver because it was closed source (and a similar kernel version, so the driver could be used), since there was no driver in the mainline kernel.
But to try to answer the question, this device has been designed by the OpenWrt developers to fit their needs (and their users needs). Other routers running some variant of OpenWrt on them by default were designed by companies unrelated to the project. They most likely used OpenWrt because it was convenient to them. Their intentions weren’t usually the same as the OpenWrt team’s (repairability, easy to unbrick, etc.). Not that there is anything wrong with that. I like GL.Inet routers.
I fail to see how a single port GbE LAN would suffice when other devices got more than that.
I would prefer more LAN ports as well, but how does that relate to what I said? I never said they intended to build or should build a device that fits all use-cases.
They’re puzzled - as am I - on why such a glaring spec failure was chosen by the OpenWRT team.
So it’s Banana Pi.
Begs me to ask why, out of all their models to base on, they gotta pick the one with a 2.5GbE port and a single GbE port. I am fully aware they have similar board with four GbE ports instead.
This would be potential impulse buy territory if it was 2x2.5… but a mix of 1 and 2.5 is frankly a tad baffling
And why only 2 ports? I’m fine w/ being limited to 1gbps uplink because that’s probably all I’m going to need in the near future, but only having one other port means I definitely need a switch to start using it. I currently use three ports:
- uplink
- wifi AP
- everything else
And having more is always better. Ideally they’d provide 5 ports, and have at least one be PoE (ideally all 5), and I’d be 100% okay with paying a bit more for it.
I’d rather have more ports and have them be PoE but limited to gigabit speeds than only having one 2.5G port w/o PoE. I could maybe be okay with only two ports if one was 10G, but 2.5G is not enough to make it worth redoing my switch setup.
What’s wrong with having a switch? And why build in capability that people aren’t necessarily gonna use?
The intent of this is to be a cheap but capable homelab router. Building in more ports / integrating a managed or unmanaged switch / adding PoE is only going to drive up cost. BYO is absolutely the answer to “I want more ports” here.
Literally the ONLY thing they would need to do to make this perfect is to make the LAN port upgradable to 2.5G - anything past that and people are probably going to be looking at more serious enterprise-grade hardware anyways.
Having at least one more port makes debugging a lot easier, and it also opens the door to port-based VLANs. If they had three ports, it would be infinitely more useful to me, and any more ports than that is just icing on the cake.
But only two ports means you have to get a separate switch unless you’ll only ever have the one ethernet device.
In terms of tradeoffs, drop the Wi-Fi capability entirely and add more physical ports. I doubt the Wi-Fi module is any good (doesn’t even do 6GHz), and it doesn’t seem to be replaceable either. If you’re going for a home-lab setup, you’re going to want more ports. If you’re going for a regular home user use-case, you’d prefer a better Wi-Fi card. Maybe sell two models, one w/ better Wi-Fi (full 6E standard) and one w/ more ports and no Wi-Fi.
Fair points.
I’d say they could make three versions:
- a “clean” single-port WiFi-only model but with actually good WiFi hardware (so, 7 if possible; 6e at least)
- the current model, but with 2x2.5
- one with no WiFi and at least 4 ports, including at least 2x2.5
Yeah, I’d be down with that, and I’d go for the last one. I only need 1 2.5G port, though 2x is always nice to have. The extra gigabit lines would be nice for separated VLANs, like running my camera network (don’t want that touching the net).
I really like the spirit of this, but the price and features are just okay considering there are other companies designing similar and better products with more flexibility and around the same price. I may pick up a board to work on it, still, but I’ll buy the Inet package with the same hardware and more Ethernet ports for $99 if given a choice.
What other hardware at this price point would you consider for running openwrt?
Crap, I literally just bought a GL.iNet GL-MT600 Flint 2 which runs GL.iNet skin over OpenWrt & it has an option in its settings to switch direcrly to OpenWRT if you prefer, or you can also flash OpenWRT onto it yourself too.
Interesting, but at $160 the GL-MT600 is nearly twice the price of the OpenWrt One.
Good to know about though! My whole reason for asking for alternatives is I’ve had a great experience with dd-wrt in the past, and I’m sick of ubiquiti, so I’m looking ahead for my next router.
OpenWRT is cool, but I prefer OPNSense because unlike OpenWRT, you can actually upgrade OPNSense in its UI without requiring linux partition surgery.
What are you talking about? Upgrading on OpenWRT only takes the new ROM image uploaded thru the Web UI.
The in-place upgrade process leaves a lot to be desired, in my experience. I understand why routers with limited storage capacity wouldn’t be able to support it, but the lack of A-B partitioning support for x86 and ARM builds in 2024 is really stupid.
If an upgrade introduces a regression and breaks, my family is stuck without internet while I spend a few hours re-flashing an old release and making sure everything still works.
This, right here, has been my experience every time.
Also when you run a complicated setup with over a dozen VLANs, policy routing for failover internet on specific vlans, and nat66 support due to secondary internet only giving you a /64, yeah… not fun having to set all that up because the updater breaks, yeah… no.
The Linksys WRT3200ACM has A/B firmware support, but unfortunately that router is starting to get a little outdated. Saved me from a couple bad upgrades, but unfortunately it died on me about 4 months ago. I updated to the Banana Pi BPI-R3, which has been great for my network speed, but was a lot more complicated to set up.
I lost all my data from my router trying to update it using the ui and had to reconfigure everything. I use linux for a long time, but openwrt is on another level
I broke my router updating OpenWRT :(
Every single time I’ve setup OpenWRT, keeping it updated was much more painful than anything else, even ASUS WRT-Merlin was easier to keep updated.
Are you trying to say you’re not a fan of needing to reinstall packages after an upgrade? It’s so simple with these easy to remember commands:
opkg update cat /etc/backup/installed_packages.txt | grep overlay | sed s/\ *overlay// | xargs opkg install
That’s why I wrote an Ansible playbook, to configure and update my router and access points. It’s nice having this almost as infrastructure-aa-code, with all configuration changes under version control with a clear commit message. The script is available at https://github.com/danielvijge/openwrt-configuration-ansible, but do make some changes to match your configuration. I keep my network configuration (inventory file) in a separate, private GitHub repo, as that contains passwords etc.
OpenWRT is a different scope than opnSense.
I have a few OpenWRT devices to cover WiFi in my home and definitely an opnSense on top of them for wan access and all the fancy stuff.
OpnSense can’t to WiFi access point, thanks to BSD limited WiFi cards support, and definitely cannot fit on cots devices like OpenWRT can.
As well as indeed opnSense is a better choice than OpenWRT for edge devices.
While OpenWRT would do opsSense job, at least in part, the opposite is not true.
I use Unifi Access Points for wifi
Weird. Been upgrading several OpenWrt machines for many years now. Click a button in the UI, select a file, click another button to update.
I personally just buy MikroTik routers. Yeah, they’re not FOSS AFAIK, but they work really well and there are a ton of guides and whatnot. They also have a good assortment of hardware, so finding the right fit for my network is pretty easy.
If I ever decided to go away from MikroTik, I’d probably DIY my own router instead of going w/ something like OpenWRT. I did my time w/ DD-WRT, Tomato, and OpenWRT, and honestly, I prefer my MikroTik router.
I once setup MikroTik routers… they were cool, but the ipv6 implementation required manual intervention - this is not something you want with an isp that dynamically rotates their ipv6 addresses often. Once I discovered pfSense/OPNSense, it was so much better in configurability and ease of upgrade, as those OSses are FreeBSD-based and designed to run on PCs.
My ISP doesn’t support IPv6, so I haven’t needed to touch that, but we’ll be getting muni fiber soon-ish (they claim the next year or two), so that could change. I’ll definitely think about upgrading to pfSense or something when that happens.
Definitely in the vein of what I was looking for, but for almost $90 I am going to ask for WiFi 6E
Personally I’d get standalone AP’s and hang them off a standalone switch so that if the internet gateway goes down the LAN experience is not interrupted.
I don’t know what that would do for me, though, what can I do on the LAN when the internet gateway is down? Also, why should the gateway reboot? I would like it to be up all the time
The gateway device should definitely be up at all times, but in the real world, things don’t always go as planned.
If you only use the internet, then maybe having your AP go down when your gateway goes down is fine. For us avid self-hosters, that is unacceptable behavior.
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what can I do on the LAN when the internet gateway is down
Access your NAS from your workstation or your media PC.
Ah… Yeah 6e seems like a reasonable ask
a reasonable ask
Off the car lot, we say ‘request’.
I’m a little confused, what do you mean? That because it’s an open source project it’s more polite to request than demand?
Sincere question, I don’t quite follow
For that price I recommend an EU built router that comes with a modified OpenWRT but also allows installing vanilla one - Turris Omnia. It is also very modular an can be upgraded (e.g. with 5G)
I saw the omnia for €339, vs this router…
Turris Omnia is 4x the price of the OpenWrt One.
I think I must have switched up currencies and somehow concluded the price is the same. That’s on me
Hm, this might not be a bad replacement for my Unifi access points, if its radio is up to snuff. It’s significantly cheaper than Unifi for WiFi 6.
E: ordered one
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I don’t do a lot of self-hosting and what little bit I do is just my Monero node over tor. So I primarily just use Wi-Fi on my devices and never use Ethernet. In fact, I don’t think I’ve connected Ethernet to a router for a primary device in like 10 years. I have connected Ethernet to a device temporarily to do troubleshooting, but having a device connected to Ethernet all the time is something I have not done in a long, long time.
That’s awesome! The links to buy seem to be down though which is less than helpful
Industry “conventional wisdom” often argues that FCC requirements somehow conflict with the software right to repair. SFC has long argued that’s pure FUD.
i mean, it is at conflict with right to repair. having to accept harmful interference to be certified means that repairability suffers simply because the device needs to be made to break.
I don’t think that’s what accepting harmful interference means. It means more like, if there is noise in the channel, the device won’t just up its own power to clobber the noise, even if not doing that will somehow break it or otherwise make it not work right. It doesn’t mean you have to build the device so that some kinds of interference will cause it to break.
i have always interpreted it as you cannot block signals that will break you. like if the us military drops an emp on you, you can’t design for that.
now that i type it out i realize how weird it sounds though.
