10 ms·

PSA Anyone with commodity routers, repeaters, etc. please check out LEDE project https://lede-project.org https://lede-project.org. Check if your device has su

• linkmotif 9y ago
  I put openwrt on my $20 tp-link router that couldn’t even handle a single torrent and now it functions like a beast. Installation was so easy. I just downloaded the openwrt firmware file and uploaded it using the tp-link web ui like an official update. Software!
• skeleton 9y ago
  I'm interested in installing a different firmware on my home router, but there are many offerings. Is there any reason you recommend LEDE over the others? (e.g. Tomato)
  • bubblethink 9y ago
    Maybe the name LEDE is not familiar to you, but LEDE is an openwrt fork, which is essentially going to get named to openwrt again through a merge since that's where most of the openwrt work is happening. From the various open or semi-open firmware, LEDE is the most active and open I think. Various other firmware will still be quite tied to vendor binary drivers.
  • ktta 9y ago
    Tomato, DD-WRT, etc. try to be extremely user friendly. Not that LEDE doesn't, but people who have some technical expertise tend to benefit a lot more from LEDE with all their packages. Especially if you can compile an image yourself (it is pretty easy on linux), then you can have all the features tailored to your preference.
  • jlgaddis 9y ago
    OpenWRT/LEDE firmware is nice. I think I first used it with the (original) WRT54G. The future of the project is uncertain, however. They may or may not be around much longer.
    • jml7c5 9y ago
      >The future of the project is uncertain, however. They may or may not be around much longer. Can you elaborate on this?
      • JetSpiegel 9y ago
        The mailing lists mention LEDE will merge back to the OpenWRT branding, but that was months ago, and the OpenWRT site is funky.
      • jlgaddis 9y ago
        In a nutshell: OpenWRT existed. They kinda sorta pretty much stopped doing anything. LEDE sprang up as a fork, with several of the OpenWRT folks. Then they all decided to work together and joined back up. Now it's anybody's guess what will happen next, if anything, as nothing has really happened since.
        • bipson 9y ago
          That is not true in my experience, the LEDE site is quite active, spewing out builds very frequently, even fixing KRACK almost immediately. Don't know what you consider as "nothing has really happened"
        • jimmies 9y ago
          OpenWRT is dying, but LEDE is alive and kicking hard.
• bubblethink 9y ago
  >You will be able to do a lot more with your router and they have quick security fixes Just a counter point to this. Lede on its own doesn't have a very smooth in place upgrade system. If you are in the loop, sure you can do upgrades, but most people would never log in to their routers after setting it up. I think something like google wifi is not a bad solution either, with the obvious privacy tradeoff. It runs chromium os, and will update reliably on its own.
  • xyzzy_plugh 9y ago
    Chromium updates require a reboot to take effect, right? How does Google WiFi reliably update without service interruptions?
    • King-Aaron 9y ago
      I don't use the device so this is purely speculation, though I would assume they'd have configurable setting to push/apply updates at off-peak / night times?
    • bubblethink 9y ago
      Kernel updates do need a reboot. That's there for any linux based device. There are some improvements in kernel live patching. Not saying that google wifi, or any router uses them.
  • ktta 9y ago
    I realize people's opinions differ on this, but having Google's wifi router is one of the most privacy compromising things one can do. Security wise, sure, great idea. But there's so much data to collect at the router level. From wireless MAC addresses (which it already does), and to every single IP address visited by every device in the household. I might sound paranoid, but with continuous news of Google's privacy intrusive choices on Android, iOS etc. I will not trust them with that data, ever.
    • ksec 9y ago
      Apple Airport is probably the best router I have ever owned. Not the fastest, but extremely Stable, based on NetBSD and from a company that makes money on my hardware rather then my Data. I really hope they will have an 802.11ax version once they iron out all the crap that is going on in there.
• proctor 9y ago
  Also, I maintain a page[0] that lists the top routers with support for openWrt and DD-wrt. http://rooftopbazaar.com/routerfirmware/ http://rooftopbazaar.com/routerfirmware/
  • jlgaddis 9y ago
    Nice referral links on your page. I see from your comment history that you've spammed HN with it several times in the past as well. --- Edit: To be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with affiliate links. To me, though, it's the same as someone here mentioning their product or service in a comment without disclosing their affiliation. It's one thing to tell another person "The FooBar 9000 is a good router.". It's quite another to say, "The FooBar 9000 is the BEST router on the market. Oh, look, here's Joe. He sells those and you can buy one from him right now.", without mentioning you have previously worked out a deal with Joe. It's not the affiliation that's the issue. It's the lack of transparency about the affiliation. (And, in this case, for me personally, it's that the OP apparently tries to work in a link to his page anywhere he can in HN conversations.)
    • faeyanpiraat 9y ago
      What’s wrong with monetizing your stuff if you provide value? (Haven’t checked out the linked page, this is more like a generic question)
      • falsedan 9y ago
        Nothing wrong with monetization, it's how you do it that's important.
    • Xylakant 9y ago
      I fail to see the problem with affiliate links in that context. The site openly disclosed that they use affiliate links to amazon. The site provides a value, a ranked list of compatible devices. I might actually use it if I were shopping around for a device. Building and maintaining it probably takes some effort. It deserves to get paid. If you think that all for-profit pages should be banned from mention then this here would be a barren place, devoid of links to useful services. added after the parent modified his post: Even after you changed your comment, I fail to see a problem. The poster explicitly says "I maintain", openly disclosing his affiliation with the site. The site does not recommend a specific device as "the best", it provides a list, ranked by a disclosed set of criteria from which you can pick. You can actually change the filters and the sort order - cheapest, graded by performance, ... We can agree or disagree on the specific sort criteria picked or the completeness of the list, but the grandparent actually does sometimes engage into discussions about this, soliciting feedback (and I presume implementing it). It adds value over the device lists that LEDE and OpenWRT provide. The grandparent does mention the page every time the context makes sense, but alas, when else would he mention it? Would you prefer if the grandparent just posts the link as a reply to each and every post? He built something that adds value, so why not mention it? It's not like it's the only thing the GP ever posts. Seems more like a lurker from the comment history, but come on, the last mention was 141 days ago, it's not like it's spammy. All in all your comment comes off as being jealous someone built something that provides a little income.
• Kenji 9y ago
  I work with OpenWRT/LEDE and compile it myself. Can confirm: A very pleasant experience.
• konart 9y ago
  Is there any reason to switch from OpenWrt yet?
  • gsich 9y ago
    OpenWrt was basically dead after devs switched to LEDE. But they are remerging again, it just takes some time, so use LEDE if you install something now.
  • lmns 9y ago
    Security patches. OpenWRT hasn't had any in the past year.
• nerdponx 9y ago
  FWIW this only affects repeaters, not routers.
  • philjohn 9y ago
    And repeaters are also supported by Lede, the TPLink RE450 being one such (I should know, I run a totally LEDE stack at home, and have an RE450 to get the signal better upstairs).
• stordoff 9y ago
  FWIW, it can be worth checking beyond whether or not your device is _supported_. I had DD-WRT running on an ASUS RT-AC68U for a while, and ended up switching back to a fork of the official firmware (Asuswrt-Merlin) for better performance once I upgraded to a >100Mbps WAN connection (IIRC it was something to do with hardware-accelerated NAT).
  • philjohn 9y ago
    There's a patch to enable Qualcomm FastPath in LEDE, this offloads simpler TCP and UDP traffic from the Kernel stack and gets me 960Mbps LAN to WAN on a Netgear R7800.
    • vlan0 9y ago
      I like it when you talk dirty like that...
    • robert_foss 9y ago
      Why isn't the patch upstreamed?
      • philjohn 9y ago
        Because stuff is only upstreamed when it's totally stable and known to work on a wide range of devices, it's still a tad experimental (albeit many people are using it successfully) You can get dissent1's pull request here: https://github.com/lede-project/source/pull/1269 https://github.com/lede-project/source/pull/1269
    • sondr3 9y ago
      Where can I find this patch? I'm on one of the ASUS routers but want to try out LEDE, but don't want reduced throughput.
      • theandrewbailey 9y ago
        I think these are it: https://forum.lede-project.org/t/qualcomm-fast-path-for-lede/4582 https://forum.lede-project.org/t/qualcomm-fast-path-for-lede... https://github.com/gwlim/Fast-Path-LEDE-OpenWRT https://github.com/gwlim/Fast-Path-LEDE-OpenWRT
• philjohn 9y ago
  This. I've got a TPLink Repeater (RE450) and a Netgear R7800 router, both are running LEDE and have given me a slew of great features out of the box, and many more that can be installed after the fact using the packaging system. There's also a third router, an old TP-Link 1043ND running as a wireless bridge to connect devices in my AV setup, once again running LEDE.
• adminadminadmin 9y ago
  Why LEDE over Merlin for ASUS?
• tambourine_man 9y ago
  Anyone care to explain the pro/cons of DD-WRT vs Tomato vs OpenWRT vs LEDE vs etc?
  • cheald 9y ago
    LEDE is basically an OpenWRT fork which is being actively developed. The biggest draw is that it's actively developed, and managed in a Linux-style package manager setup, rather than monolithic baked firmwares that you have to flash wholesale. Patching against things like KRACK was as simple as just invoking the package manager. DD-WRT and Tomato are both old tried-and-true alternatives to vendor firmwares, and they require less tinkering to get into the state that you want, but they both tend to have weird crufty edge cases that never get properly fixed and don't seem to have any clear direction or leadership - they are both a hodgepodge of forks that you have to spend time digging through hundred-page forum threads to find information about. Development schedules are sporadic, and you often end up with dozens of potential builds in varying states of beta and testing which fix this or that but break this or that other thing. When they work, they're great, but my experience with LEDE has been consistently superior than my experience with DD-WRT or Tomato.
    • 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
      Just to be clear, OpenWRT isn't 100% abandoned, but it's basically just a handful of sporadic package version bumps and backported bug fixes, which might not ever make it into an official numbered release. If the counts on GitHub are accurate/comparable, LEDE has almost 2000 more commits than OpenWRT. The OpenWRT website also seems to be semi-abandoned (the front page has had a spam post on it for over a month; it looks like it was moved there accidentally by a moderator intending to move it to a "trash" subforum).
      • rrauenza 9y ago
        I naively bought the Linksys WRT 1900AC about when it released because it claimed dd-wrt support at release. Then the dd-wrt folks mentioned that Linksys never actually gave them hardware ... and if I recall, hadn't really been included in the plans to support it at all. So then I waited and found whenever I looked for the dd-wrt firmware, it always had lots of caveats and known issues. I gave up. Shelved it and bought a pfsense box for the internet and use a Ubiquity wifi AP.
• muxator 9y ago
  On LEDE, it seems that there is always an hardcoded DNS fallback to 8.8.8.8. I see it in my logs, even if none of my configuration files mentions it.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • craftyguy 9y ago
    Wow, that's unfortunate. Are you sure no clients on your network aren't configured to use Google dns servers?
    • muxator 9y ago
      Yes. The message is in the system logs of the router.
• guftagu 9y ago
  It seems like they support every model but exactly mine. I'm running TP-LINK TL-WR845N
• acidburnNSA 9y ago
  Thanks! I have been running DD-WRT for a while and was displeased that their updates were unofficial builds served over HTTP, ugh. LEDE looked right up my alley and this evening I went ahead and installed it from the SSH window of my DD-WRT install. After a few hours I had the OpenVPN server in "road-warrior" mode with all firewall rules functioning and now I just finished up getting my USB drive mounted on it. It's really slick, thanks a ton for the suggestion!!