21 ms·
It's one of the most successful routers ever sold and yet network equipment manufacturers are still fighting tooth and nail to keep their devices closed source.
by ginko 6y ago
It's one of the most successful routers ever sold and yet network equipment manufacturers are still fighting tooth and nail to keep their devices closed source. It just doesn't make sense to me.
- Maxburn 6y agoThat's why I'm so impressed with OPNsense and pfSense and a wide selection of build it yourself hardware selection with them. You can own and tinker with your own router top to bottom. Seems like a niche market and I'm wondering why they aren't catching on with this same community that embraced the WRT.
- sq_ 6y agoWonder if there's a chance some of the router projects and Pine64 could collaborate somehow to make a fully open router. Pine64 seems to be quickly developing some production chops and the various router projects also seem to be doing great work.
- Maxburn 6y agoANY more work in this space would be great. The SG1100 seems similar already though. Most configs of the Pine64 I'm looking at are single Ethernet port though, I'm not a fan of the router on stick config, even the one in the SG1100 is confusing internally.
- yellowapple 6y agoIf Pine64 threw a bunch of Ethernet ports into a Clusterboard that'd be a pretty killer platform for a router. Start with one SOPINE for the actual router stuff, then add more for things like NAS, print servers, home streaming, home automation, etc.
- MartijnBraam 6y agoThe issue with that is it's A64 based, you only get one native 1Gbps port on that and you kinda need at least 2 if you're using a router for it's routing functionality. You could get a rockpro64 and stick a nice network card in it's pci-e slot and probably outperform the clusterboard.
- yellowapple 6y agoThe Clusterboard solves that issue by including a built-in unmanaged switch (which is indeed how all 7 SOPINEs can share a single Ethernet port). So a router-capable Clusterboard seems like it'd just be a matter of adding more ports (be it by using the same switch chipset and swapping SOPINEs for ports or by using a different chipset with support for more than 8 ports - assuming that the chip in question is indeed limited to 8 ports). Unfortunately I can't seem to find any detailed info on the Clusterboard components/schematics on their wiki, so I don't know what more it'd entail.
- MartijnBraam 6y agoOfcourse you can add a switch to it but that doesn't magically give you more routing bandwidth. You'd have to do router-on-a-stick which halves your bandwidth
- yellowapple 6y agoGood point. And the SODIMM-based pinout doesn't seem to include support for PCI-E or additional Ethernet, so that is indeed a bit limiting (though I'm betting some of the pins could be repurposed if both ends are configured for it, e.g. if there was some way for a SOPINE and baseboard to negotiate "hey, neither of us have camera support, so let's use the camera pins for extra Ethernet").
- pimeys 6y agoTurris Omnia is supposedly one of these routers. I have their old model from a few years back, and it's been serving quite well for all my needs. The OS is their custom version of OpenWRT, and you can do stuff like LXC, Wireguard and all that quite easily. The only problem is the ARMv7 hardware, which doesn't really cut it with modern Internet speeds anymore, especially with Wireguard. That said, I can't wait for pfSense and opnSense finally support Wireguard. And pihole should finally get a FreeBSD version. I'd much more prefer the sense systems over the wrt, but the time is not yet here.
- Decade 6y agoI think the big motivation for the Omnia is the Turris project, not open source per se. Security threat analysis and automatic updates from the nonprofit organization that runs the Czech DNS registrar. LXC, Wireguard, and the customization options from the mini-PCIe slots are a bit of a bonus. The Omnia doesn’t have great OpenWRT upstream support, and the wireless performance sucks. 2GB of RAM seems enormous for a router, but when I put a medium-size number of clients on it (100-ish), its security monitoring features overran the memory and oom-killed essential services. Fortunately, that can be turned off. And the Turris project seems to be retreating from modern Internet speeds. The Omnia can’t keep up with 1Gb full-duplex fiber, but they’ve moved onto their next product: The MOX/Shield is even slower. (1.6 GHz CPU vs 1.0 GHz CPU)
- elkablo 6y agoI have recently (one week ago) found out that MOX can easily route (and maybe even NAT) 2.5gbps with just about 50% of CPU usage, via the XDP framework. Unfortunately it is not easy to get XDP to endusers. For me the interesting part on MOX is modularity. You can have 24 switched ethernet ports, which is interesting for network admins at least.
- Decade 6y ago…So it can route 2.5 Gbps, by cutting out Linux’s entire networking stack and rebuilding the minimum necessary in eBPF. Not slowed down by NAT or TC yet. How do you do the I/O? As I understand the MOX, it has one SGMII interface for the built-in 1G Ethernet port, SDIO and PCIe for the WiFi interfaces, and a single 2.5 Gbps SGMII interface to the rest of the Ethernet ports. To get 24 ports, you connect 8-port modules together via their 2.5 Gbps SGMII interfaces. Seems like the I/O should be enough for 1 Gbps full-duplex, which is enough for a home router with a gigabit Internet connection, but it can’t do 2 Gbps full-duplex.
- zajio1am 6y agoPC Engines makes a long-term series of pretty open router boards that works with vanilla Debian, current iteration is APU2: https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm It is pricier than low-end router, but they are high performance and are much easier to use.
- mikepurvis 6y agoOne plus of this over just using old PC hardware is that you have a proper physical serial port and no video interface at all— there's no failure mode which exists on it that will have you dragging over a monitor and paging through BIOS screens or whatever in the corner of your basement.
- izacus 6y agoI'd love to find a compact router/machine that has SFP/Gigabit switch and optionally PoE capability with pfSense support. Sadly, my annoying Mikrotik is the only thing I've found until now :(
- Maxburn 6y agoThat's a big wish list for compact.
- zamadatix 6y agoIt's 3 common things, one of which marked optional. The only "big wish" on that is the desire to run decent software of the users choice on it which is a big wish for anything except a PC-turned-network-device.
- izacus 6y agoI know. Mikrotik managed to build it though (HeX PoE), but sadly it has a pretty old SoC.
- harha 6y agoI would love to see some more prebuilt pfsense boxes with useful options (like built-in 4G) - there are some on Amazon without detailed specs and some small vendors that don’t feel like shipping in all of the EU (can’t blame them for the regulatory and tax challenges).
- Maxburn 6y agoI believe the underlying BSD is the issue here, everyone that says they tried to do it says it is an awful experience. Similar story for the problems with realtek Ethernet chips.
- harha 6y agoFor the 4G? It's not ideal but there are some options [0] - though the list would be nicer if it had a few filters, like interface and supported bands. [0] https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/cellular/hardware.html https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/cellular/hardware...
- e_proxus 6y agoTekLager is a Swedish shop that has a fe quite nice options. https://teklager.se/en/ https://teklager.se/en/
- jabl 6y agoI think those that want to run an open source software stack, but not assemble the hardware themselves, are served pretty well by going to the OpenWrt website (the successor project around the original wrt54g open source release), and choosing a suitable router from the table of hardware they maintain, and then just install openwrt on top of the stock firmware. That's what I've been doing ever since I jumped ship from ye olde WRT54G (currently I have a Zyxel Armor Z2, and I'm happy with it).
- Maxburn 6y agoI never dove into the WRT devices myself but it definitely has a niche.
- 0x0000000 6y agoFWIW, "assemble the hardware themselves" means buy a > 5 year old desktop computer and add a multi-port PCI-express NIC. Or even a USB3 -> Ethernet adapter. Moving to pfSense was the best decision I made for my home network.
- icelancer 6y agoYou can even buy one of these ready-made boxes and slap on pfsense. https://smile.amazon.com/Firewall-Appliance-Gigabit-Celeron-Barebone/dp/B0741F634J/ https://smile.amazon.com/Firewall-Appliance-Gigabit-Celeron-... I use this exact model + RAM + mSATA drive and its more than powerful enough to sit in front of my SMB gigabit fiber connection while running DPI/OpenVPN/zabbix/etc. pfsense is awesome and the learning curve is pretty reasonable if you understand basic network theory. I love it.
- fl0wenol 6y agoI mean, the issue is some people don't want to run a whole desktop or laptop with a 20+ watt power supply to provide the occasional wifi to a phone/tablet. Unless you're running a media server plus other services (or you have a lot of end users on a fast connection) I feel like a pfSense setup is a bit overkill, and this is where OpenWRT on your ARM+Switching SoC-of-the-week excels.
- unethical_ban 6y agoOn the other hand, Ubiquiti has given end users an option for business class wireless and routing that wasn't available. You want a "real" router in 2005? eBay > Cisco.
- ip26 6y agoIt's funny, Ubiquiti keeps getting talked up on HN, but every time I try to shop for their equipment out of curiosity, it's basically panned everywhere else. Don't know what to make of it.
- 293984j29384 6y agoI treat it as prosumer grade equipment. I use it at home but not at the office. My general rule of thumb is if I need it to make money, it's not going to be Ubiquiti.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI don’t think there’s any good options outside of commercial brands. If my Airport Time Machine and Extreme die, I’ll probably switch to premium Netgear equipment. Meraki would be nice except Cisco owns it now and they are experts at milking you with annual fees.
- josteink 6y ago> If my Airport Time Machine and Extreme die, I’ll probably switch to premium Netgear equipment. Why just replace them with second hand units? Apple may no longer sell them, but they are still widely available.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI assumed I wouldn't easily find them, but I will get them if I can!
- na85 6y agoI have ubiquiti gear for my home network. It's pretty good for what it is, which is basically "consumer networking gear for power users" but I'm not sure I'd use ubiquiti to do serious networking for an enterprise environment. Maybe a small business/doctor's office type of environment.
- NullPrefix 6y agoYes, it may very well be the most successful router ever sold, but have you thought about how many new models were NOT sold because the oldie WRT54G was chugging along all too well?
- bostik 6y agoIf its success has kept uncountable, "segmented" garbage devices from ever entering the market, I'd say WRT has been even better for the consumers than you think.
- enchiridion 6y agoI think you both agree. Unfortunately what is good for consumers in this case is bad for companies, because it reduces long term sales.
- therealx 6y agoThanks for connecting those dots for me.
- hyperman1 6y agoI'd think there must be another reason. Almost anything a corporation does is optimizing for the next quarter. Sales 2 years in the future are a problem for the next set of CxO's Some candidate reasons: Open source is still to different and hence risky. Or maybe arrogance and not invented here syndrome.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoBut think of the economies of scale and the $ saved in terms of RnD and marketing
- mywittyname 6y ago
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoWhen routers are ordered in bulk from ISPs in certain countries, the ISP is the customer, not the end user. The ISP often doesn’t want the end user to be able to do things like enable IPv6 and things that could boost the effectiveness of Bittorrent. A closed-source design ensures that only the ISP can change certain settings.
- londons_explore 6y agoI suspect it's more that when someone flashes a router with custom firmware, they are far more likely to then spend hours on the phone with tech support because they have messed up the MTU settings or can't get VoIP to work because the the SIP ALG isn't working properly anymore... For every person that delves into the internals who knows what they're doing, there are 10 people who delve into the internals following some incomplete and outdated online heresay...
- colejohnson66 6y agoThis is the real reason. 90+% of their customers are, for lack of a better word, idiots when it comes to “hacking”. The ISP just doesn’t want to deal with it. And for the 10-% who do know what they’d be doing, the ISP doesn’t care because it’s another configuration they have to support. There’s a reason ISPs won’t help you if you hook your own router up. It’s not malicious. Just then doing what makes sense from a financial and a training standpoint. It’s scummy, but the Dunning-Kruger effect with tech is very real.
- cbozeman 6y agoI'm fine with that... if they can prove it. They have to release stats that show what percentage of customers called in with a custom firmware and how long it took the techs to solve their issue. I guaran-fucking-tee you someone smart enough to flash a custom firmware will likely have scoured the Internet for the answer first. Most of the time, they'll find their answer somewhere on a forum / blog post. I would actually be willing to bet money that technical support spends far less time with these people than it does with older customers who "can't be bothered with reading" or younger customers who grew up in the "it just works" generation. There seems to be a middle ground of people, I think we're called the Analog-To-Digital generation, that had to actually put effort into learning technology, because so much shit had to be manually configured, that we gained a pretty solid understanding of tech and we don't have the fear of it that I see in people even just five years older than me (I'm 40), and the lack of interest in digging around in the "guts" that I see in people far younger than me (25 and under).
- pyvpx 6y agobecause working through the absolute trash fire that has been closed source merchant silicon SDKs was/is a competitive advantage. things like P4 will move the competitive advantages farther up the stack where they belong
- sonotmyname 6y agoYou can buy a new WRT today that supports FOSS firmware out of the box - https://www.linksys.com/us/wireless-routers/c/wrt-wireless-routers/ https://www.linksys.com/us/wireless-routers/c/wrt-wireless-r... And yet Linksys (and others) still sell their closed routers as well. One can only concluded that the Open Source support, while important for a niche group, is not enough for market dominance...
- hhh 6y agoI had a WRT1900AC for several years. It was a very nice product, with very good community support. Official support, however, was not good in my experience. Several years later I finally bought a Ubiqui Dream Machine Pro, and absolutely love it. Kinda miffed that they suffered a breach a month after I bought it, though.
- lostlogin 6y agoI’ve dithered on the UDM-P, the reviews are very mixed. I’m in a strange place with UniFi as a whole, as my APs are limiting download speeds to about 275mbps while upload speed is line speed, as is wired speed. There is lots on forums and Reddit about strange issues like this with Ubiquiti and they could really do with some firming up of their software.
- merlinscholz 6y agoI recently sold my UDMP and bought some mikrotik gear, because the device hat very tight limits on what ubiquiti wants you to do with it. No wireguard was an annoyance I could live with, but disabling NAT was not possible and a switch backplane running at 1gbps were the final blow. Also I do not want to have to log into an online account to use my (maybe airgapped) router.
- sscarduzio 6y agoI'm curious about what Microtik router did you choose?
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoIt's why I decided to make my current router a full PC running Linux with a couple of NICs and am looking into getting wireless working directly on it.
- Bluecobra 6y agoI’ve done this in the past and had great results. The only downside is that running a regular PC drawing ~100W 24/7 can easily add up to $100/year depending on electricity costs and eventually an embedded device would pay itself off.
- jaclaz 6y agoCan't say if it applies to your case, but as a firewall/router I use a "thin client" with a TransMeta processor, the actual model is Fujitsu Futro S, there are/were several sub-models, mine is an old S220, it runs Zeroshell (a Linux distro) with an added "normal" PCI network cards and it is like 15W: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Futro/s200/ https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Futro/s200/
- Decade 6y agoThin clients were fun, but they aren’t nearly fast enough for modern multi-gigabit Internet connections. They can route maybe up to a couple hundred Mbps. I’m wondering whether a mini-PC can route even 1 Gbps at line rate. Lots of people are using mini-PCs as routers, but most of them have only 1×1Gbps Ethernet interface and no PCI slots. The Minisforum DMAF5 has 2×1Gbps Ethernet interfaces, but that’s an off-label use and I haven’t seen any benchmarks. Of course, if you go all the way up to mini-ITX, then there are plenty of options for various performances of CPUs and network interfaces.
- toast0 6y agoI can't say for sure what you can do with a miniPC, but I did 1 Gbps routing with all packets going through userland and back to the kernel (because of any over elaborate at&t router bypass) on a pentium g3258 (haswell, dual core, 3.2 Ghz) and it was fine. A transmeta box seems probably a bit old, but relatively few people have gigabit internet. If you wanted that box to do wifi too, that might be problematic; but I generally use wireless routers configured in access point mode to be access points. In access point mode, as long as the networking hardware and drivers are decent, you get fine performance; you don't need great NAT acceleration or properly managed memory for state tables on the wireless devices, since that's managed on the router/firewall/could be a home server too.
- Accujack 6y agoThe manufacturers are mostly run by people who were trained in "standard" corporate governance. This includes the ways to protect corporate revenue streams by suppressing (legally, of course) competition, delivering a range of products by producing the top end model and crippling it to sell at a cheaper price point, and repeatedly reducing costs to increase profits in a "race to the bottom". Until a new set of management philosophies is adopted for teaching, a large number of companies will keep doing the same thing, because in general corporate managers have a lead time associated with them, and we won't run out of the old school ones until 20+ years after philosophies change. This is an opportunity for anyone who can do things differently, of course.
- ownagefool 6y agoYour standard bigco manager also believes a whole bunch of FUD about the lack of OSS secrity and what not, but it's 20 years unless upstarts eat their market. Probably more likely for your average software company than hardware, but I suspect there's an inflection point in cheap hardware.
- stereolambda 6y agoI see all this as a heartwarming story where a company was forced, with a "trap" set by GPL and its philosophy, to offer people for once a square deal: good hardware, fairly priced, you are free to do with it what you want. All this serves human needs better and the manufacturer could in fact turn a profit. There is a faint, faint glimmer of hope that this is a peek of the far future of our techno-political-economic system. Of course with very different laws around intellectual property, company governance, customer protection, terms of participating in the market etc. We might be as far from it as the Enlightenment in 1750 (in a world built on overt serfdom and not even fully developed colonialism) was from the year 2000, but still. Makes me feel a teensy bit better about doing the right thing today, just because.
- pjmlp 6y agoOn the other hand this kind of "mistakes" are what is driving the new generation of POSIX clones for IoT untainted by GPL, like Azure RTOS, NuttX, Zephyr, RTOS,...
- znpy 6y agothe WRT3200ACM is available for purchase, is an almost-direct descendant of the WRT54GL and is supported out of the box by OpenWRT/Linux.
- earthscienceman 6y agoDoes OpenWRT implement some of the more obscure features, like MIMO and what not? I'm still using DDWRT on a Trendnet AC1750 supported router. I definitely don't need much more but I could use some bandwidth and power range for local transfers and such.
- yellowapple 6y agoYep, those are pretty much all I buy nowadays for home / small office routers. Absolutely rock solid.
- guenthert 6y agoWell, the original WRT54GL (Linux version with 8MiB RAM) cost me ~$50 when it was new, the WRT3200ACM is offered for $250. A descendant perhaps, but no replacement.
- orthoxerox 6y agoI really like my Xiaomi Mi 3G. Cheap, has both 802.11ac and 1Gbps ports, runs OpenWRT. The only issue I have with it is no AES support on the CPU. My VPN speed is effectively limited by one of its cores running at 100% decoding OpenVPN traffic.
- mobilio 6y agoUse WireGuard as VPN OR change OpenVPN encryption to Chacha20
- Teever 6y agoI recommend buying the WRT1200AC used on Ebay. They usually sell for $30-50 USD + shipping.
- 6y ago
- nashashmi 6y agoSome routers openly tout the hackability of their routers to add open source firmware as a selling point. But those were also relatively expensive.
- k__ 6y agoWhich is kinda ironic, since obviously router software is the worst.
- m-p-3 6y agoEspecially when they stop pushing firmware updates and leave the whole thing open to become part of a botnet. Seriously, keep the damn thing open.
- jandrese 6y agoThis. It drives me crazy that companies want to lock down the firmware, but then won't take responsibility for keeping their locked down firmware from being taken over by bots. If they hate maintaining the software so much let the community take over. If I were a AP manufacturer I would have like 1 software guy total, and his job would be to make sure the drivers for the hardware is always up to date on the open source software that my product ships, and to contribute bug fixes and feature improvements to that software. Well, I like to think that anyway. I have some suspicions that chipset manufacturers like to keep their documentation behind NDA that precludes anybody who signs it from contributing to open source software.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y agoNeither of those options push the user to buy a new router every few years.
- Decade 6y ago“Open” is not the only problem. I tried prioritizing “open.” I had a customized firmware on a fully open-source (even open-source WiFi firmware) Atheros-based router. And “open” turned out to mean, “enough rope to hang yourself.” I didn’t dare update that thing for years because I installed it in an inconvenient location and I couldn’t trust that it would continue to work if I installed upstream updates. Now I emphasize update automation. The closed firmwares of ISP routers are not great, but the ISPs take charge of maintaining them. I don’t recommend plain OpenWRT to non-technical users because it doesn’t auto-update. Maybe a Turris router, because they have the CZ.NIC people in charge of updates. Even there, the transition from Turris OS 3 to Turris OS 5 has been disruptive because of the upgrade from OpenWRT 15 to OpenWRT 19 and its migrations to Device Tree and Distributed Switch Architecture. At least CZ.NIC is still updating the Turris OS 3 packages.
- wpietri 6y agoIt depends a lot on what you mean by successful. Was the WRT54G successful in terms of sales numbers and value delivered to users? Absolutely. But in terms of internal hype, ever-increasing revenues, and executive promotions? Probably not.
- jrochkind1 6y ago> As Lifehacker put it way back in 2006, it was the perfect way to turn your $60 router into a $600 router, which likely meant it was potentially costing Cisco money to have a device this good on the market.
- walrus01 6y agoIf you really want a small fully open source router these days, you can build your own VyOS (evolution of Vyatta) install ISO, which is fully open source, and install it on some small x86-64 system with multiple 1/10GbE interfaces. Or install pfsense, which is also fully open source.
- mikepurvis 6y agoTo be fair, there are a number of companies who have made a go at open source routers but ended up deciding on a proprietary path after all—thinking especially here of Ubiquiti's RouterStation line and the Mikrotik RouterBoard. Plus there are a number of options for open source router OSes that you can install on standard PC hardware. I don't know that this proves anything one way or another, but I think it's a bit simplistic to imply that this kind of thing doesn't exist purely because it's never been tried.
- godzillabrennus 6y agoThe margin on routers is lower than cloud subscriptions. Hardware with margin to support open source is available from companies like Netgate but pricing isn’t competitive with consumer products.
- gcblkjaidfj 6y ago> It just doesn't make sense to me. you probably typed that, and everyone here will read on a macbook, which just switched from bash to zsh to avoid GPL. On a BSD kernel to avoid GPL. with browser and OS build by a compiler that had to receive tons of features to catch up with the GPL one. On browsers that were built on top of GPL (chrome) and LGPL (safari) engines but that magically become BSD along the way. All the evidence suggest Open source is a toxic gold mine for corporations.
- peteretep 6y agoAnswer is right there in the article: it cannibalized more expensive router sales.