I ended up replacing my home router last weekend. Had the age old decision: openwrt, or dd-wrt? I'm still not convinced that openwrt/lede does a good job explaining why it's a better choice. I went back to dd-wrt, but mostly because I'm familiar with it. I wonder if they could do with a better "marketing" attempt on their landing page? On re-reading https://openwrt.org/start - I think I may switch back.. but I wonder how many others did the same.
I'm really liking OpenBSD as a router for those reasons but it's certainly more work intensive. I'd argue not that much but as soon as you start telling people to ssh into a box and fire up vi you've justifiably lost most people. Even technical people since OpenWrt offers all of the features with far less pain.
OpenWRT has a plugin supporting, point and click web based Ux called "Luci" that's sits on top of a nice cli "uci" that sits on top of text files in /etc/config .. You can do almost anything from any level, it's the best of all worlds.
DD-WRT's main failings are binary blobs, supported hardware and the build system. In order
- DD-WRT has absolutely no qualms about integrating with a binary blob riddled router SoC. The last router I had with DD-WRT Support (ASUS RT-N16) ended up languishing on it, even after the b43 driver was reverse-engineered, and significantly out-performed the vendor driver!
OpenWRT by contrast, refuse to allow binary blobs in the tree. This has bitten vendors in the past, Linksys a few years ago with their PR move for "bringing back" the WRT name with the WRT1900AC (my personal router) dropped about 40~ patches on the mailing list a few weeks after launch, then tried to force the OpenWRT team to simply "accept" the Marvell driver being closed source. This resulted in months of back-and-forth between the two parties until an open source driver was added
- Finding out if your hardware is supported by DD-WRT is an absolute joke. The website seems to be sporadically updated, by whom or what is unknown. Usually devices will languish for years as a "no" or "wip" for support, when in reality they've had support added via the forums years ago
OpenWRT has almost very device they support in their Table of Hardware (ToH) Wiki. Information on devices that are being actively worked on is usually in the forum, which the wiki links to when needed
- DD-WRT is notoriously difficult to build or port to other devices. The current build instructions seem to be atrociously outdated https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Building_From_Source#... (Fedora 9, which is cited on the page but not documented was released May 13th, 2008. Over 10 years ago!)
An old accusation thrown around has been that the DD-WRT developer tried to license the software out to OEM's for profit, so having it easily modifiable for end users was seen as a negative. There were several "Buffalo" branded routers that carried DD-WRT, but the rumor was never truly "proven" as it were
Tonight I successfully upgraded my home router from LEDE 17.0.4 to OpenWRT 18.06. I was somewhat surprised that I didn't even need to reconfigure. As an OpenWRT user for about 10 years, I've appreciated its reliability as a primary home router, as well as the ability to repurpose inexpensive consumer routers into wired or wireless network appliances. It's been a useful and enjoyable Linux distro for me.
I have several Netgear R6100 routers and I'm very happy with their performance and functionality. They are easily available on Amazon for $20 or so. The only shortcoming with them is that they have 100mbps ethernet ports, which I don't use.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 39.6 ms ] threadThat being said, a ipv4 router with a few nifty features is as simple as following this http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html
- DD-WRT has absolutely no qualms about integrating with a binary blob riddled router SoC. The last router I had with DD-WRT Support (ASUS RT-N16) ended up languishing on it, even after the b43 driver was reverse-engineered, and significantly out-performed the vendor driver!
OpenWRT by contrast, refuse to allow binary blobs in the tree. This has bitten vendors in the past, Linksys a few years ago with their PR move for "bringing back" the WRT name with the WRT1900AC (my personal router) dropped about 40~ patches on the mailing list a few weeks after launch, then tried to force the OpenWRT team to simply "accept" the Marvell driver being closed source. This resulted in months of back-and-forth between the two parties until an open source driver was added
- Finding out if your hardware is supported by DD-WRT is an absolute joke. The website seems to be sporadically updated, by whom or what is unknown. Usually devices will languish for years as a "no" or "wip" for support, when in reality they've had support added via the forums years ago
OpenWRT has almost very device they support in their Table of Hardware (ToH) Wiki. Information on devices that are being actively worked on is usually in the forum, which the wiki links to when needed
- DD-WRT is notoriously difficult to build or port to other devices. The current build instructions seem to be atrociously outdated https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Building_From_Source#... (Fedora 9, which is cited on the page but not documented was released May 13th, 2008. Over 10 years ago!)
An old accusation thrown around has been that the DD-WRT developer tried to license the software out to OEM's for profit, so having it easily modifiable for end users was seen as a negative. There were several "Buffalo" branded routers that carried DD-WRT, but the rumor was never truly "proven" as it were
Any recommendation for a good entry-mid range home router running OpenWrt smoothly?