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To be fair, a whole heap of routers DO have third party firmware available. Pretty much anything using Qualcomm 802.11a/b/g/n/ac chips usually has OpenWRT/LEDE
by philjohn 9y ago
To be fair, a whole heap of routers DO have third party firmware available.
Pretty much anything using Qualcomm 802.11a/b/g/n/ac chips usually has OpenWRT/LEDE/DDWRT builds available, and more recent fullmac Broadcom chips are seeing more support.
Quantenna and Mediatek can still be difficult to get working, but they have a far smaller market share.
If you want a good, open-source friendly, router manufacturer for the home stick to NetGear. They've got an entire community called MyOpenRouter where people provide customised builds of the official firmware, as well as versions of DD-WRT and NetGear themselves often have a version of OpenWRT available.
I've been running LEDE (OpenWRT) on a Netgear R7800 in my home for the past year and it's been rock steady, is nicer to administer than the stock firmware and I can strip out anything that I don't want running on there very easily with a custom build.
- acidburnNSA 9y agoSeconded. LEDE/OpenWRT is now running my and lots of my friends' routers. Once they see my OpenVPN server running on it with a roadwarrior setup that lets me get onto my local network, security cams, and Home Assistant self-hosted home automation stuff they all want one too. Very slick stuff. You can even set up VLANs and lots of other fun advanced features.
- philjohn 9y agoYep, I've got an OpenVPN server running on mine as well for similar reasons. It's also useful to get fine-grained control of the firewall for parental controls - tag the mac addresses of the kids devices as having to use OpenDNS websafe DNS resolvers, then block any other DNS traffic on the firewall and enforce time limits on internet usage. I've got a small NAS connected to it as well to serve as backup repository for all computers in the house (which is then synced off to a cloud backup storage provider) and media server.