Openwrt is so nice. Despite small teams and budgets, they power so many routers and are also good at research and new features. The sqm/fq_codel stuff alone makes it worth running openwrt. If you are not familiar with it, go to dslreports.com and run a speedtest. If you get a poor bufferbloat score, openwrt can help. A lot of vendors (even big enterprise ones) use openwrt builds for their products, but don't provide updates, documentation or sources to their customers. You'll see a lot of devices running old openwrt in the wild.
>A lot of vendors (even big enterprise ones) use openwrt builds for their products, but don't provide updates, documentation or sources to their customers.
Case and point, Ubiquiti networks is once again flagrantly violating the GPL. Their AmpliFi product is basically just a reskin of OpenWRT but they won't provide the source to it.
It's based on Vyatta, they've had it going since before the split into Vyos but as I understand it there was some collaboration between projects as they are both forks of Vyatta.
wrt bufferbloat: my internet is too fast (150 mbps) for a cheap router to effectively manage the connection, meaning that unless i pay 250€ for a router, I will just slow down my Internet needlessly.
150 mbps can be managed easily by an Archer C7 or one of many other QCA ar71xx based routers, which can be picked up for under $50 nowadays.
The Netgear R7800, while a bit more expensive ($150), is still cheaper than the price you mention, and is very powerful and able to handle gigabit speeds easily.
have a look at ubiquiti routers: their edge router lite is capable of handling gbit, and can protect against buffer bloat at up to 100mbits/sec. the only doznside is that they are harder to manage than the average consumer router
The edgerouter lite is quite old at this point and if the purpose is to use QoS to manage buffer bloat then the EdgeRouter X which is only like $50 would be faster. The edgerouter lite is of limited use for new installations nowadays.
Edit2: Arrgh, and didn't read far enough on the thread before sticking my foot in it where you otherwise discuss the Mikrotiks.
(previously)
Going up to the question of Slovenia higher in the thread, there's a Slovenian vendor who has the "hAP ac" (dual band, gigabit, SFP, USB port) for 121 Euro (https://www.virtua-it.si/izdelek/mikrotik-routerboard-hap-ac...) along with other less-capable and cheaper models.
I have 150 Mbps and a sub $50 router (ac-68u commonly sold by t-mobile on clearance as tm-1900) does fine with sqm without any significant loss in speed. Note that this has no open wifi drivers. So you'll need a separate AP, or use a more blob friendly distribution like dd-wrt. Or use two of these, one with blobs as AP and one without blobs running openwrt. That was a great combination under $100.
To be honest, that router costs 28 000 RSD ( https://www.gigatron.rs/ruteri/asus_dualband_wirelessac1900_... ) which translates in EUR to 236 EUR, so your point is not valid for outside of the USA. To get a feel for a router that costs exactly €50, see TP-Link MR3420 V5. Also, the router you mentioned (ASUS RT-AC68U has a dual core 800 MHz Broadcom processor and 256 MB RAM and 128 MB Flash storage, while most routers at 50€ have a 400 MHz Ralink/Mediatek Processor (single core) with 32MB (at most 64 MB) RAM and 4 or 8 MB SPI memory. ) I'm glad you happen to live in a country where you can obtain such a router for so little, I am not so lucky, so I use my ISP provided one that barely manages that 150 Mbps (thankfully with a Gigabit port (yes single LAN port)).
Yes, this is the discounted price because the hardware is a bit old. However, I think there are some decent affordable routers around the world. More so if you are open to ordering from China. I haven't been following the ultra cheap space too much, but you should definitely check out the forums. There are also APU2 boards (https://www.pcengines.ch/) that may provide a good bang for the buck. There's also old x86 hardware if you don't care about power consumption.
The only thing I've found that is acceptable to me is this: https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_ac2 (or "RBD52G-5HacD2HnD-TC", ... damn, don't they love the long-ass names). 128 MB RAM, Qualcomm processor quad core at 700 MHz (but ARM! :) ) and 5 gigabit RJ45 ports + Dual Band WiFi and a USB port! Plus, even if I can't get OpenWrt to work on it (though I prefer it), I can find my way with Mikrotik's RouterOS. I actually recently setup a PTP link at 3 km with 2 SXTsq's. Though I expected 100 Mbps, it only ended up being 72 Mbps stable, more than that and there's problems with the connection. I liked the old SXT more, you could put OpenWRT on it, the new ones use weird flash memory which OpenWrt can't write to...
edit: forgot to mention, it's 60€ brand new from a friend who works at a WISP
The firmware for routers like this is stored on SPI flash memory, and the size of the SPI flash chip determines how easily you can fit third-party firmware like OpenWRT on the router and how many compromises are necessary to do so. It's soldered on so not really user replaceable.
I am sorry mate, but this is not true. I have a connection that is 220 down and 12 up and my C7[-v2 can run SQM and I can get 190 down and 11.5 up. Set your Queue setup script to piece_of_cake.qos:
This is a provocative comment although it begs the question:
Can you easily run OpenWRT on Orange PI 3 immediately after purchase?
If not, I think that could be a factor in why someone might pay more. They might want to leverage the work of OpenWRT developers.
I too recently picked up another pocket-sized SBC with Gigabit Ethernet. Compared to Orange Pi 3 it has two additional Ethernet ports, better antennas (no dongle needed), more TF card storage (128GB vs 64GB), well-tested OpenWRT support and everything to build from scratch is on Github. Like Orange Pi 3 it uses U-boot and one can easily recover from accidental bricking without opening it up.
Also has customer support, automatic updates and an additional GUI which are not things I needed but probably increased the price.
Orange Pi 3 has a GPU, HDMI port and jacks for audio and composite video. Is the buyer intending to "build a custom router" paying for specs she does not need?
What is the estimated power consumption for Orange Pi 3?
What are some examples of "overpriced routers"?
Imagine for the sake of argument we posted specs for various SBC's here without giving the "brand name" and let readers bid on what they would be willing to pay. Assuming readers could not see each others' bids, how widely would the bids vary?
Is each spec worth the same to each buyer? Do all buyers have exactly the same needs?
> I too recently picked up another pocket-sized SBC with Gigabit Ethernet. Compared to Orange Pi 3 it has two additional Ethernet ports, better antennas (no dongle needed), more TF card storage (128GB vs 64GB) and well-tested OpenWRT support.
I like GL.iNet routers: small, inexpensive and come with OpenWRT. I was very happy with my AR300M until it started getting unstable after a few months: need to hard reboot it every couple of days. Not sure if I'm unlucky or if it's inherent to inexpensive routers.
A couple of reasons. First, up until recently you couldn’t buy good hardware to build your own router, that was cheap and had gigabit or faster Ethernet. Second, support. If something happens to me or I am traveling, I want others to be able to figure out wtf is going on. Third is that I might want more than one AP and I might want to install them in places that are not great for home built looking hardware.
My current setup is a TP-Link router with OpenWRT, and UniFi access points for Wi-Fi. The UniFis are really nice because they are PoE, so I only need to run a single wire to where they are installed.
That’s not to say that what you did was wrong. It’s super cool! Just not a one size fits all solution.
Just to add up, an old and obsolete atom-based netbook is a super powerful platform for OpenWrt that you may already have lying around. If it's not too old and you tweak the BIOS and configure power management, it will draw not too much electricity. x64/x86 OpenWrt targets work great, you just need to be careful with the WiFi hardware regarding driver compatibility. Consult wikidevi.com and OpenWrt wiki. It may even be possible to use an integrated wifi.
If it's not enough, you can try to run OpenWRT inside a VM/LXD container and use a host OS for the greater good. It's lots of fun!
Sounds good, but all these noname Chinese boards literally have no support and no updates. If something serious like KRACK attacks will come - good luck to patch it all.
The new release still works fine on a TP-Link TL-WR1043N/ND v1 (32MB RAM, 8MB Flash). This is an old router I got from the local reuse center for $10 a few years ago. It can handle a 100 Mbps fiber connection fine and has 5 gigabit ports. Thanks Openwrt !
Personally, I prefer to use each platform for their strengths.
I was looking for a good router which could handle high VPN speeds, while still being usable.
I found for 50 bucks on ebay a "thin client" which sported an AMD cpu with AES hardware acceleration, and a PCIe socket to put an Intel 2xGBit PCIe card I had lying around.
Installed pfSense on it. Works flawlessly. Use few watts (because thin client).
I then found for 50 bucks on ebay a Ubiquiti Unifi AC.
I haven't messed too much with it actually, because I find crazy you need to install a whole Java suite with Mongo and everything to just run the Unifi Controller to be able to configure a bit the Unifi Access Point. I'm considering putting OpenWRT on it. Though I think I will still try this Unifi Controller, because of the advanced guest
capabilities, which is still not as good on OpenWRT.
And then I bought a Ubiquiti Nanostation AC for a Wifi bridge.
For this one, I indeed replaced official firmware with OpenWRT because I can't stand that Ubiquiti makes standard Wifi unusable to push their "Air" technology. I want standards before anything else.
In the past, I "resurrected" cheap TP-Link MR3420 I had for an other project, which were bricked. Amazing that after all those years, I could still reuse hardware thanks to opensource software !
So yes, a BIG thank you to OpenWRT developers ! If any of you are out here, please receive my gratitude =)
For people Wanting a cheep router to run OpenWrt look on ebay for TP-Link C7 or WD-N750 The N750 is not AC tho. All my routers can run SQM on my internet and it is 220 down and 12 up.
I'm not sold on the C7. I bought one, ran openwrt on it for a couple months and my children and their i-devices routinely swamped the wireless. I upgraded to a WRT3200ACM and am much happier with how it handles a large number of connections and I have no more issues. I think the C7 is a bit underpowered these days.
Hi your c7 will not do thoes speeds with SQM the cpu is not fast enough. If you are running OpenWrt 18.06.2 you can use softwair off loading. Go to firewall and tick the box for it, but make shure you disable SQM first and it will get full speeds.
I have a C7 with OpenWrt, but:
If your internet is fast, OpenWrt is not good on the TP-Link C7, see this issue: https://forum.archive.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=53703. I downgraded my internet from 1gbps to 500mbps because of this issue (still plenty fast, not complaining :D)
Anyone know a decently priced router with 802.11ac and hardware encryption that can run OpenWRT? I currently have an TP-LINK Archer C7 with OpenWRT but VPN performance is abysmal. I don't know if my router has any hardware decryption (I would assume not) but if it does OpenWRT can't use it.
I just found out that the Archer C7 now has support for both Qualcomm SFE and hardware decryption. No official builds yet (all official builds for the C7 are based on kernel 4.9 while SFE requires 4.14), but I found this: https://github.com/gwlim/openwrt-sfe-flowoffload
For me the speedup with SFE is almost x2, haven't tried hardware encryption yet.
With this, I would say the C7 is an excellent router for OpenWRT.
Asus RT-AC58U is well supported by OpenWRT (with a bit more involved installation) that uses a SOC (with 4 core ARM CPU) that is well mainlined so crypto acceleration should work. It is available for 75 €. More information on
https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/asus/asus_rt-ac58u
Not sure about hardware encryption but T-Mobile often offer new/refurbished TM-AC1900's for <$40, which you can easily flash to an RT-AC68U. I believe the RT-AC68U has limited support with OpenWRT: https://openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-ac68u, but performance has been really good for me considering the price.
edit: disregard the above. It looks like Broadcom chips can only run on the 2.4 GhZ b/g spectrum.
I have cheap router with 32 Mb RAM and 4 Mb flash (TP-Link TL-WR841N v8), and I'm not sure if I should update from 15.05.1, due to raising memory and flash requirements: https://openwrt.org/supported_devices/432_warning. There's build for my router, with 3,474K sysupgrade image, so it's probably compatible.
15.05.1 is very stable, but I'm not sure about vulnerabilities it has, such as recent wifi vulnerabilities.
With 4MB don’t expect any persistence between reboots.
Passwords, packages, etc: all gone.
Definitely not recommended unless you pre-tailor your setup using imagebuilder. (Reference: latest OpenWRT on similarly capable device, D-Link DIR615.)
Are there any routers supported by OpenWrt that can handle 1Gbps WAN to LAN? My current router only pulls 150Mbps and I want to keep OpenWrt due to the amount of custom network configuration that has been done.
The NetGear R7800 would be somewhere between the two in cost, and reportedly does GB for wired, somewhat less over WiFi. Pretty easy to find used ones for $100USD too.
Try looking at the fast path module.[0] Your router might have some kind of Qualcomm NAT accelerator chip[1] that isn't natively supported/distributed by OpenWRT.[2] You'll have to compile your own build of OpenWRT, so it might be a bit difficult to get going. I haven't needed to do it, because my WAN connection is only 50 Mbps.
What custom config ? If you need sqm with gigabit, x86 would be a safe bet. If you want just raw throughput without additional processing, others will do that fine.
Openwrt was how I discovered Linux. I was just blown away by how powerful yet simple it is. I'm currently using a "real" server instead of a overpriced and slow consumer router.
There are security fixes here... is there any perspective given on how critical these are? I'm curious about the urgency of upgrading existing firewalls with the new release.
OpenWRT is more "linux like". It can feel like a full blown linux system. Sure, it does have a web interface, but if you're used to doing stuff by ssh, OpenWRT is great: nice text configuration files, organized root tree and pretty much any package you get on any desktop distro, if you have the necessary space on the device...
I even run it in some KVM environments for intra-VM routing and firewall because it's lightweight.
OpenWrt has packages you can install. I use Adblock BanIP HTTPS DNS Proxy SQM GIT for downloading scripts for testing bufferbloat and line speed. https://github.com/richb-hanover/OpenWrtScripts
Stable releases come with the web gui preinstalled. On nightly builds it's not included, but just install the luci web gui using the opkg package manager.
Out of "hundreds" I see 5-7 that look like decent home wireless routers at first glance (4+ gigabit ports, available new, b/g/n/ac, no unsupported hardware when running OpenWRT, <$150).
Based on that the original statement "I still don’t know any good reasonably priced routers which supports Openwrt." is very understandable. A lot of rows != an easy list of good routers.
This does not appear to be officially supported. On top of that, it appears to require one to use Xiaomi mobile software and accounts to set up the router initially prior to any flashing.
The "3G" model is not the model you linked. The 3G model requires you to flash proprietary firmware and then associate the router with a Xiaomi account using mobile apps for God only knows what convoluted reason. I would not trust this router even with OpenWRT running given the amount of blobs it requires and the hoops Xiaomi makes you jump through in installing an aftermarket OS.
I don't think that the Archer C7 hardware (or most consumer router hardware) supports any kind of encryption acceleration aside from what's built in to the WiFi radios. If you want a hardware accelerated VPN, you need to either get one of the Cavium-based Ubiquiti routers or something with a relatively high-end processor implementing AES instructions.
The lower routing performance has largely been solved in 18.06 with software flow offloading.
It depends upon your definitions of "good" and "router". If you are ok with <300 Mbps speeds, the Raspberry Pi 3B+ makes a surprisingly good router with openwrt. I suspect a lot of similar devices also work at Gbps speeds for very reasonable prices.
If you also need an access point, the cost does start to increase a little, but it still isn't bad at all, IMO.
I've converted some devices in the past, the latest one being a small TL-MR3020 box which now connects my Ethernet printer to my home AP.
Though I like openwrt, the web interface could be improved (meaning: making it more clear and simpler) because the above task, although trivial, required a lot more time than it should have.
Openwrt also doesn't forgive errors: on another little router I mistakenly deleted or disabled the wrong interface, and now that box is unreachable from anywhere until I'll take the time to open it and connect a serial port to reconfigure it from a terminal. But that's more of a feature :)
hard to parse this statement, since the software itself is doing the lion share of making the router "good" (unless you mean wireless g/n support or something?)
i've used this project to put new life into a Buffalo router that's probably 10 years old and runs way cooler and more performant than the original firmware. same with an ASUS router that's probably 6 or 7 years old.
Hardware is quite important; wireless standards keep evolving, some people care about how many ethernet ports they have, and system details (CPU, RAM, flash memory) determine performance and features (you lose a lot trying to fit your system in 32MB of flash).
Surely you mean you lose a lot trying to fit your system in 4MiB of flash, seeing as the stock images will flash to any 8MiB device with plenty of space left for configuration and the odd extra package or seven.
My grandmother has a SiteCom WLR-4000 (aka SiteCom WL-351, aka EnGenius ESR9850) and that has a 4MiB flash chip; building OpenWRT for it is a pain, but I can still get a flashable image that does everything I need it to do, including the stock web interface (LuCI), with 100k left for persistent configuration data.
It even has WireGuard (kmod-wireguard, luci-app-wireguard, luci-proto-wireguard) on it for a bridge to my router at my home.
When it breaks, or if I ever upgrade my WNDR3800, I'll give that to her. But for the time being it's still perfectly serviceable.
OpenWRT is designed home routers with cheap/slow CPU’s, a few MB of memory, and small ROM’s.
If you have better equipment available to use, then sure, anything else would likely be an improvement.
It is hard to fully generalize that question, since I'm sure it varies a little bit depending on the virtualization software and how well it passes through USB devices. I don't see why it wouldn't work, though.
You should really update mate. The 54gl is verry slow now and can not run the latest OpenWrt. It's not safe to have a wrt54gl in the wild. If you would like to chek out all the security bugs that have bin fixt just look at the change logs for the OpenWrt releases.
My god! You mite as well leve your devices out in the street, with know passwords on them and ask members of the public to take what files thay would like! "Roll up Roll up! Here's all my data, fore you good people. come come, get what you want! come it'sa free for all!"
