11 ms·

OpenWrt: A Linux OS targeting embedded devices

271 points by pykello 1y ago

esseph 1y ago
A lot of companies were built on this.
- nine_k 1y ago
  It's fun to see that "Amazon choice" portable routers are based on OpenWRT, and run OpenVPN and Wireguard out of the box.
- aftbit 1y ago
  The first DJI drones (original Phantom at least) used OpenWRT on their "Range Extender" boxes.
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  And all it took was forcing one company to divulge its proprietary closed-source codebase because they screwed up and incorporated copyleft code deep into their core. Imagine how much progress could be made if a few other companies were forced to crack open their proprietary closed-source codebases...
  - bobmcnamara 1y ago
    I think many companies saw that and poopood GPL firmware.
    - shadowgovt 1y ago
      They were poopooing that before the OpenWRT case. I don't think there's evidence to suggest that the OpenWRT case made them less willing to use GPL (especially since use of GPL would always have implied they should open-source the firmware derived from it).
      - bobmcnamara 1y ago
        Until then, some companies didn't seem to take it too seriously.
- CursedSilicon 1y ago
  Ubiquiti uses a fork of OpenWRT. Starlink's routers run it as well. I'm sure a ton of other vendors are using it
  - wtallis 1y ago
    The WiFi silicon vendors seem to base their SDK/reference software on OpenWRT (albeit often badly-outdated versions), so almost everyone selling a WiFi box ends up using some variant or fork of OpenWRT. It's been a long time since the days of Linksys trying to cut DRAM costs by using something other than Linux. There are still exceptions like MikroTik where the OS and configuration tools are a main selling point (still Linux-based, but not OpenWRT).
  - gh02t 1y ago
    Where does Ubiquiti use OpenWRT? I saw that claim elsewhere in this thread but I'm pretty sure their original devices were based on Vyatta, and their newer stuff is a custom Linux OS of their own that is loosely Debian-flavored. Poking around in the terminal all the Ubiquiti devices I have used are very clearly unrelated to OpenWRT.
    - esseph 1y ago
      Ubiquiti started in outdoor wireless, point to point and point to multipoint. All their outdoor radios, cameras, and unifi APs are all running a version of openwrt. EdgeRouters started on vayatta and then that went away (AT&T acquired Vayatta) and then that forked into VyOS. Some of the Ubiquiti EdgeSwitches are running some other OS, but I can't remember what it was. Source - Spent 14 years helping alpha / beta test, debug code and wireless problems, etc.
- haukem 1y ago
  I assume that about 20% to 50% of the home routers, Access points and Wifi mesh devices sold world wide are based on OpenWrt. Often some old versions of OpenWrt with many vendor modifications, the UI is always custom. I know that the main vendor SDKs from Qualcomm, Mediatek, and Maxlinear are based on OpenWrt. I think only Broadcom uses an own Linux distribution which is not based on OpenWrt in their main SDK. Linux has a market share of about 99% in this market, I haven't seen VxWorks in any recent home router or access point.
realz 1y ago
What’s new with OpenWrt?
- esafak 1y ago
  Apparently they released a router last year.
  - pseudosavant 1y ago
    This is actually probably the best thing OpenWRT have done in quite a while. I got two (one for a backup) and I've been super happy. I've happily used TP-Link, GL.iNet, and Raspberry Pi 4 devices, with OpenWRT in the past, but nothing beats the "it just works" aspect of a first party device designed for this, fully open, and a reasonable price. Most off-the-shelf devices have too slow of CPU for a low latency/buffer router. The Raspberry Pi 4 is easily fast enough but needs to use USB3 network adapters which require packages not in the default rpi4 OpenWRT image. Not insurmountable, but a consistent pain every upgrade.
    - aftbit 1y ago
      I ended up building my own image of OpenWRT to make the package hell better on upgrade, and as a bonus, I was able to build in my configs too. Recovering from a failed Pi was as simple as flashing the most-recently-built image. Upgrading just required rebuilding the image (and resolving whatever went wrong, of course, though it was usually pretty light). As a bonus, it's easy to swap SD cards on the Pi so I can have the last "known good" config available while taking the update. Now I run OpenWRT on one of those x86 mini PC boxes with 4x 2.5GBe Intel NICs because my wirespeed is 2 Gbps symmetric, so I needed just a bit more oomph than the Pi could provide. The hardware is somehow even _less_ reliable than a Pi 4 - I'm already on my third machine in 3 years. I would love to find something more reliable.
      - pseudosavant 1y ago
        OpenWRT has also made it incredibly easy to package in any arbitrary pkg into image downloads from their website. You don't need your own build infrastructure now. I'm curious what your experience would be like with a Pi5/CM5 solution using PCIe for your ethernet. It is pretty easy to have spare boards and SD cards around for Pi setups. I've had good reliability with Pi setups using good passive cooling (no fan to die).
_mu 1y ago
all my routers run TOMATO
- champtar 1y ago
  Curious what are the main benefits ? (I've only ever used DD-WRT and OpenWrt)
  - ZenoArrow 1y ago
    I use Tomato too, but I wouldn't say it offers many benefits over OpenWrt. The main thing is that routers based on Broadcom chipsets often only work with very old Linux kernels (such as 2.6.xx kernels), as the drivers are closed source. For these routers, the primary third-party router OS choice is to use Tomato.
- poisonborz 1y ago
  Apples and oranges. It is a nice tool for closed-source Broadcom devices that OpenWRT will never support. Otherwise it has nowhere near the complexity and features.
- Bender 1y ago
  All of mine are Alpine Linux. No UI but small, simple.
  - opan 1y ago
    Have you written anything about setting this up somewhere?
    - Bender 1y ago
      I have not but if there was enough interest I could make a rough go at it. It's not a very complicated setup. It's basically Alpine Linux with some custom sysctl and interface settings, sch_cake with custom settings, cdg, netfilter, Unbound DNS with some local zones for limited spam filtering and a cron based refresh of common domain names, blackhole routes for known clowns and DoH/DoT IP addresses, chronyd for NTP, dnsmasq for static and dynamic DHCP, gratuitous arp cron job to lower latency and steal back my IP if someone tries to take it and restore quickly from ISP router failover all running on a Protectli VPN class small business firewall with cron snapshots/backups from another node. My first pass would probably just be a static page with linked text files of the configurations and a brief synopsis of what each file or in some cases individual settings are performing.
xattt 1y ago
I do find it sad/ironic/interesting to note that the router that started it all is no longer supported. Not to bell the cat, but some sort of symbolic build for the WRT54G(L) should still be possible… right?
- gforce_de 1y ago
  You can build the image yourself, but have to switch off some packages or features - otherwise the image (linux-kernel + tools) is just too large or consumes too much memory. The original router has 8 megabytes RAM-memory and 2 Megabytes flash ("storage"). You can boot a recent kernel 6.16.5, but with 8mb there is not much left to work with 8-) A starter is here: https://intercity-vpn.de/files/openwrt/wrt54gtest/minimal/ https://intercity-vpn.de/files/openwrt/wrt54gtest/minimal/
  - aftbit 1y ago
    I remember swapping the TSOP packages on a WRT54 to double the RAM. Here's a blog post about this, not sure if it was the same one I followed: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2010/09/upgrading-ram-in-wrt54gv2.html https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2010/09/upgrading-ram-in-w...
- mac-attack 1y ago
  My uneducated guess is that that people that want this kind of symbolism aren't willing to actually become a maintainer and invest time in niche code for a declining user base?
  - xattt 1y ago
    Hence belling the cat
mifydev 1y ago
OpenWRT is such a good os for a router - simple but configurable UI, works reliably, I wish router companies would just ship it by default
- mifydev 1y ago
  But then you get annoying firmware providers like Broadcom who refuse to write OSS drivers for linux and a lot of work is being spent on the reverse engineering
  - echelon 1y ago
    Can we accept a pragmatic world where we have OSS + binary blobs? That's better than a fully commercial world or a fully "pure" world with no functionality.
    - mifydev 1y ago
      I would love that, but it seems like they are not doing that either
    - wtallis 1y ago
      GPU vendors have come to the realization that the in-kernel driver needs to be open-source, but the userspace portion can be closed-source. There's just really no good reason to accept a design where outdated closed-source drivers could keep you from running a current kernel. WiFi NIC vendors have for generations been moving more complexity into the closed-source firmware blob that runs on the NIC's own processor core(s), so there's no good reason for the kernel driver to remain closed-source.
      - zokier 1y ago
        Broadcom has been doing FullMAC designs for over a decade now, and that is exactly what you describe: moving all the functionality into firmware and having thin opensource kernel driver
    - opan 1y ago
aborsy 1y ago
Couldn’t developers of OpenWRT come up with a better UI? It’s not user friendly at all.
- mzajc 1y ago
  Please for the love of all that is good do not change/remove the Bootstrap 2 LuCI theme. It's such a great and pragmatic design.
  - aborsy 1y ago
    I come from OPNSense (different use case). Nice well-designed robust UI, even if people say opnsense is flexible and thus complex. Given that, I feel GL-inet users rarely visit the advanced section (Luci).
- wtallis 1y ago
  Could you provide any specifics? Are you wanting a dumbed-down UI that hides most of the functionality, or are you wanting the existing functionality to be exposed to the user differently?
  - aborsy 1y ago
    See https://www.wundertech.net/opnsense-vs-openwrt/ https://www.wundertech.net/opnsense-vs-openwrt/ To be clear, OpenWRT is a great OS. The UI is a bit old fashioned, existing functionality could be exposed more cleanly, and the terminology could be more intuitive. This is basically what gl-inet did! You can compare how they expose functionality. Of course, it’s limited, but eventually the remaining features in LUCI could be incorporated in the same UI.
- gardnr 1y ago
  What is your point of reference? What would you compare it to? I find it easy to understand and to use. From my outside perspective it seems like basically just Linux with a nice web UI.
- numpad0 1y ago
rdtsc 1y ago
OpenWrt is what I use. I picked my routers specifically to be well supported by OpenWrt, immediately wiped whatever the original firmware and installed OpenWrt and that was about ten years ago. Then when I replaced the hardware I also looked for a compatible model with OpenWrt and did the same. I never had any issue with OpenWrt which I couldn't solve and it just works. Its uptime is pretty much the uptime since when the power goes out due to storms and such.
- gardnr 1y ago
  I have my fibre ont and the wifi router on a cheap battery backup. It has always continued to work even during extended power outages.
- opan 1y ago
  Seconding all this. Ever since I had weird problems with the vendor firmware on a router, I just pick hardware I can put OpenWrt on right away. Works great.
- Viability1936 1y ago
  What hardware did you go with? I was thinking of getting the second most recent glinet to run openwrt, but haven't convinced myself it's worth it since my current tplink is still pretty new and is just be getting it to tinker (I don't currently even run any vlans or anything fancy)
  - rdtsc 1y ago
    I went with a TP-Link Archer C7 V2. It's quite dated by now, but it's been sitting quietly in the closet and working for all these years and I am still happy with it. My speeds are also not that fast, I only pay for 100Mbps so something faster might overwhelm this hardware. I also don't have anything fancy on it, no vlans just a few wifi networks on 2.4ghz and 5ghz, some wired devices, and two usb drivers which I access via ssh (these do require I install a few extra packages to allow mounting them).
    - emeril 1y ago
zokier 1y ago
I love OpenWrt. But I wished there was something similar but for "big" (in a relative sense) devices. I feel lot of the constraints OpenWrt is based on are not really that applicable when you have hundreds of megabytes of flash and RAM, and that is starting to become a common thing for routers these days. Even their own OpenWrt One router has 256M flash and a full gigabyte of RAM. That is not all that resource constrained anymore. What I would love is to have something that would be closer to "normal" linux distro while getting the networking goodies and ease of configuration from OpenWrt.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  Strongly agreed. I'd rather be running a Debian, with systemd, and boring regular utilities, than the bespoke environment openwrt has crafted together. I'm super glad openwrt exists, and their uci config predates systemd's attempt to build a cohesive consistent whole system configuration pattern & is epic, but given the capabilities of these systems it feels so worthwhile to de-specialize the environment, to make it more boring. What I really want is Kubernetes oriented tools that can manage hostapd & something like dawn or openert's usteer for band/ap steering. And some other ancillary wifi tools. Maybe maybe a setup for radius/enterprise, instead of just psk. You can do so much more with it, but at its core openwrt is 90% packaging for openwrt. It's not even particularly super well tuned hostapd: theres so much wireless config one can go try & enable that really is just additional 802.11 specs hostapd supports, they may improve your openwrt wifi experience.
  - the_biot 1y ago
    > I'd rather be running a Debian, with systemd, and boring regular utilities, than the bespoke environment openwrt has crafted together. Yup, that's the answer. Debian is rock solid, and a script with a bunch of iptables and iproute2 commands is so much simpler than the mess that is OpenWRT's network setup. I only use it for dumb APs, and even then it's questionable -- the UI is nice, but configuring it is unnecessarily complex IMHO.
  - freetime2 1y ago
    > I'd rather be running a Debian, with systemd, and boring regular utilities, than the bespoke environment openwrt has crafted together. I agree. I tried running OpenWrt as a wired router on an x86 mini PC, and found that it had some really powerful features and was certainly rock solid as a router. But there were some major annoyances, too. For example, their documentation includes a script for expanding the root filesystem [1] that left my system unable to boot. And while I didn't use it long enough to make it through an upgrade, their documentation on upgrades makes the process sound very brittle (it sounded like configs for installed packages don't carry over by default) and confusing. I thought about trying to set up an Ubuntu (or other popular distro) box as a router, which I think would be much easier to maintain over time. But my concern is that I might overlook some important config that is set by default in OpenWrt, and leave my machine vulnerable to attack. Having a web UI that I can log into and view/make config changes is also kind of nice. Are there any good out-of-the-box solutions or guides for doing this? (I know that OPNSense/PFSense are really popular among homelab users, but unfortunately the Marvell NICs in my mini PC are not supported in FreeBSD). [1] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/openwrt_x86#expanding_root_filesystem https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/openwrt_x86...
CursedSilicon 1y ago
I'm a staunch defender of OpenWRT. Having used just about every "router distro" folks care to name (remember SmoothWall?) for the last 20~ years, OpenWRT is built like a tank and just keeps trundling along I hope their experiments with the "OpenWRT One" keep going. I'd love to see OpenWRT take a (deserved) bite out of the "SMB firewall vendors" like Netgate or OPNsense. Or just undercutting Wi-Fi vendors like Ubiquiti who base their work on OpenWRT anyway Something I'm excited to try myself in future is running "OpenWISP" [1] to manage a small fleet (three) OpenWRT devices in parallel for a deployment in a shared workshop. This seems to also be something that OpenWRT could be better at integrating, but it's nice to see "a vendor" tackling it [1] https://openwisp.org/ https://openwisp.org/
- whalesalad 1y ago
  Related, I used to love going to the monowall website gallery to see all the labgore. It's still there like a time capsule: https://m0n0.ch/wall/gallery.php https://m0n0.ch/wall/gallery.php
- foepys 1y ago
  OpenWISP states in its docs that you should be running at least 20 devices to make it worth it. [1] So it's not supposed to be a easy way to manage a few devices for home users. > However, OpenWISP may not be the best fit for very small networks (fewer than 20 devices), organizations lacking IT expertise, or enterprises seeking open-source alternatives solely for cost-saving purposes. 1: https://openwisp.org/faq/#suitable https://openwisp.org/faq/#suitable
  - CursedSilicon 1y ago
    I saw that. Admittedly I'm only interested in a few of its functions. Namely roaming and guest hotspots I could wire up all of that manually. But I'm excited for the chance to learn something new
  - rubenbe 1y ago
    It's for exactly that reason I started with OpenSOHO. It is targeted towards the typical home and small office network with less than 20 OpenWRT devices. (although there is no hard limit). https://github.com/rubenbe/opensoho https://github.com/rubenbe/opensoho It is still a work in progress, but it is easy to deploy (one golang binary based on pocketbase)
fiatjaf 1y ago
An easy-to-setup OpenWrt-based plugin to sell internet for satoshis: https://tollgate.me/ https://tollgate.me/
hd4 1y ago
Installed it on a TP-Link to replace my ISP router a couple days ago. I'm super impressed with how it needed almost no config (except to manually activate the Wifi and to set a password). I'd recommend downloading the Material theme for anyone complaining about the barebones look.
- rolph 1y ago
  about your TPLINK, there is often a "recovery feature", an alternate boot partition [ i posted about this some time ago.] if you configure your router so that it "bricks" you can boot in the last working configuration before your changes; rescue; and save to overwrite the brick partition. presumably you can do this forever, as long as you dont brick both partitions. 3 interrupted boot cycles would cause a switch to last successful boot partition. in my case i had problems because of the curious way we have power failures here. the power would brown out and each phase of generation would send a peak and trough, equivalent to turning power on then off before boot completion 3 times. if you want to be snazzy, you can play on this and work two partitions at once each configured for different purpose, and accessed by briskly cycling power thrice.
JimmaDaRustla 1y ago
I used DD-WRT forever, but holy crap was it buggy. Once I tried OpenWRT, there was no going back. Shit just works, and works well.
- petcat 1y ago
  Tomato on the WRT-54G was the all time best in my opinion.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    Agreed... probably the best experience for a SOHO router+wifi. I currently use OpnSense on an N305 mini pc for my router and the separate wifi AP has it's own management interface. Works for my needs.
- bobmcnamara 1y ago
  I tried setting it up as a test router and ran smack into their ancient kernel and iptables not supporting statistics drop mode.
- shrx 1y ago
  Interesting, on my latest router (WRT3200ACM) I've had the opposite experience - I had to switch from OpenWRT to DD-WRT since the former was too buggy to use (couldn't get the WiFi to work reliably).
drnick1 1y ago
Another option (depending on your requirements) is to use normal "workstation" Linux distro like Debian on an regular x86 PC equipped with two NICs. I added an SFP28 dual NIC to an old gaming PC and now use it as a router/home server and can saturate the link (25Gbps). I get north of 4Gbps through Wireguard too. Routing and the firewall are built into the kernel so you don't really need a specific distro. I just added a DNS server (Unbound in recursive mode) and a DHCP server. For WiFi I use hostapd, but an external AP would be a better solution for most people.
- nicolas314 1y ago
  Did you manage to get IPv6 prefix delegation working with dynamic prefixes? Best solution I found involves scripting to re-build config files and restart a daemon, where OpenWRT just does it out of the box.
  - drnick1 1y ago
    I have a public IPv4 so I did not have to deal with that fortunately, but can you not emulate what OpenWrt does? It's based on Linux after all.
Ms-J 1y ago
Can anyone recommend a guide on the firewall?
- mac-attack 1y ago
  https://youtube.com/watch?v=DWmLVDAV5kY https://youtube.com/watch?v=DWmLVDAV5kY His content helped me when I first made the plunge into OpenWRT earlier this year and realized I knew next to nothing about networking. He also has a video on policy-based routing that is cited in the PBR documentation as well.
  - adolph 1y ago
    Thanks, I'm looking forward to watching. I was totally frustrated by implementing DNS+IP parental controls on OpenWRT and am interested if there is better tooling now. My recollection is that there are multiple wrappers of configuration behind the webUI and trying to run AdGuard home on the same hardware lead to performance problems.
    - wernerb 1y ago
      Install Adguard home on it
RomanPushkin 1y ago
Big fan of it. Allows you to create experimental software for OpenWrt, like I did: https://github.com/ro31337/big-internet-button?tab=readme-ov-file#why-this-exists https://github.com/ro31337/big-internet-button?tab=readme-ov... > In our hyper-connected world, we've become slaves to the endless scroll. Social media, news, videos - the algorithm-driven content feeds are designed to capture and hold our attention indefinitely. We tell ourselves "just 5 more minutes" but hours disappear. Our brains are being rewired for constant stimulation, making us less capable of deep thought, genuine connection, and meaningful work. > The Big Internet Button breaks this cycle by introducing friction back into your internet consumption.
peanut-walrus 1y ago
Openwrt still has some strange footguns (imo) and the upgrade process is painful. I personally just prefer running general-purpose distros for my routing and firewalling needs. I realize the learning curve for this for someone who just wants a home router is unrealistic though :) But out of all the router/firewall distros, OpenWRT it is by far the best.
- horrorente 1y ago
  I just recently started using OpenWRT and only have done one upgrade, but I‘ve found it really straightforward using Attended Sysupgrade https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/attended.sysupgrade https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/attended.sy...
mikepurvis 1y ago
Been a fan for a long time and use it on my Archer C7, but I had to disable hardware switching in order to use SQM, and now the switching performance is <200mbps. Having recently upgraded to home fiber, I'm probably going to get a native Unifi router.
- NoiseBert69 1y ago
  Maybe have a look at Intel n100 boxes (Aliexpress -> Topton). They often have 4-5x 2.5GE Ports with high quality Intel cards. They are very cheap (100-200€) and suck not too much current (5-15W). You can run OpenWRT on them using the x86 build. We usually have 5-10x of them around for emergency network tasks if everything burns down in a building.
  - mikepurvis 1y ago
    Honestly it is tempting. I do have an old Haswell-era industrial motherboard that would manage the task just fine, and I've definitely considered this path. That said, I'd probably spend about as much on a power supply, case, and NIC for that machine as I would on just buying a Unifi gateway, and theirs comes with an integrated UI for the APs. I'm past the stage of life where I find joy in tinkering with the infrastructure I need to do my job (WFH) so I'll probably still just go off the shelf.
- wernerb 1y ago
  I bought a Fujitsu Futron S920 second hand for like 30 euros. Put a dual NIC PCI in there and now have a low watt router running very fast. Can easily run 1Gbit up and down
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
Openwrt is amazing. I had a wrt54gs, and then latter got a Netgear wgt634u with an astounding USB2 port! Served as a great office shoutcast playing server for the office, a decade before Sonos (for example) existed. The hardware situation has felt very tenuous for years now. Qualcomm support has felt so so bodged in. It feels perpetually like "this new chipset will finally get us past all the horrible half working hacks of the last barely working chipset" on and on, usually sort of working but only barely. I did finally get my IPQ8074A based router going (rax120) but it took so long, and needs an older wifi firmware (their 2.7) to work. But it feels like maybe slowly it could be getting better, maybe perhaps support will be more mainline less hacked next time. One very recent example that's lovely to see is Qualcomm starting to mainline their Packet Processing Engine, for the IPQ9574 at least. Link and example hardware below. There have been various forks of openwrt that bundle in cobbled together versions of the software to use hardware offload/accelerators, lots of these. But it's been far from problemfree and are hard to maintain, especially trying to maintain kernel compatibility. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-PPE-Driver-Linux-6.18 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-PPE-Driver-Linux-6.18 https://www.524wifi.com/index.php/embedded-cpu-boards/dual-radio-boards/dr9574-802-11be-wifi-7-multifunction-main-board-qualcomm-ipq-9574-4x4-mu-mimo-ofmda-wi-fi-7-wallys-alder.html https://www.524wifi.com/index.php/embedded-cpu-boards/dual-r... https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ipq806x-nss-build-netgear-r7800-tp-link-c2600-linksys-ea8500/82525?page=76 https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ipq806x-nss-build-netgear-r7800-... It's good to see MediaTek present in openwrt space. One of the only other highly present chipsets available. The price is often quite good for pretty new wifi standard supporting routers. The anec-data I've heard is that driver maturity is not great, but at least there's motion & movement within the kernel, which springs hope eternal.
rkagerer 1y ago
I've been following OpenWRT for years, and finally made the jump. This was after using DD-WRT and various flavors of Tomato (especially Shibby and FreshTomato) for two decades on probably ~100 routers in various locations. Some of those locations were business production environments, with the routers providing VPN connecting sites across the continent as a backbone for VOIP telephony, remote user access, etc. (before the likes of Tailscale). It's an important project and I have a great appreciation for all the work the developers have put into it. But I have to admit, I was underwhelmed. LuCI wasn't as robust as I expected (the "queue all your changes as a batch of commands" approach is a great idea, but its implementation has some rough edges that simply don't work - IIRC, where the UI isn't aware of conflicting config changes you've already queued). And I found in practice getting it to do things that are easy and reliable on FreshTomato, was frustratingly unintuitive, taking more steps than I'd expect, some seeming brittle/error-prone. I'm not averse to scripting, having written short novels of commands for previous OS's, and even custom-compiled binaries (e.g. to install iPerf, before it was bundled with the OS) and a whole custom FreshTomato build that added some admin pages for long-term bandwidth/latency graphing. So I'm open to learning new things, I just felt like I was doing more fighting with the OS than should be necessary. One small example was configuring a Let's Encrypt certificate. This feels like it should be a near one-click operation. In my case it took a bit of testing and tweaking to get right - I wound up contributing my short solution back to a SuperUser answer: https://superuser.com/a/1904844/75522 https://superuser.com/a/1904844/75522 Properly disabling IPv6 took more than just a checkbox. I had "No default route present, overriding ra_lifetime to 0!" messages logged, until I added "net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1" to /etc/sysctl.conf. Maybe I'm just getting snagged by doing things in 'weird' ways. e.g. My inaugural router on it is a MikroTik wAP ac. Turns out you don't get a WAN interface out of the box when flashed on that device, and I had to manually create it. There wasn't really any documentation warning about that, and it took a while before I realized life would go better if I used a lowercase rather than uppercase convention (for better integration with built-in stuff that relies on its existence). A lingering issue I haven't figured out yet is how to make a reliable "toggle switch" to turn on and off access to the internet for one device on my network (by IP or MAC address). I set up a firewall rule, but wind up having to manually run "/etc/init.d/firewall reload" and "conntrack -D ..." each time to kill any established connections. On FreshTomato it was just a checkbox you turn on/off. If anyone has advice on this I'd be grateful. One last tip for anyone else using it on a router plugged into a Starlink endpoint that's in bypass mode (i.e. you want to be able to port forward). You'll get messages in syslog every 5 minutes due to short-lived Starlink IP: daemon.notice netifd: wan (####): udhcpc: sending renew to server daemon.notice netifd: wan (####): udhcpc: lease of ###.###.###.# obtained from ###.###.###.#, lease time 300 You can suppress them by appending "-l 1" (without quotes) to the "procd_set_param command /sbin/netifd" line in /etc/init.d/network, then reboot the router (in my case running "/etc/init.d/network reload" didn't quite do it). On the plus side, the Dynamic DNS package is working well in my setup. (And yes, I understand the implications of using Let's Encrypt on a DDNS IP). I'm not here to whine, just to suggest that anyone else thinking of making the switch manage your expectations and leave yourself some time to perfect things and get used to the new platform.
simonmorley 1y ago
RIP Cucumber Tony.
shmerl 1y ago
OpenWRT is really cool. I recently figured out it has an "attended upgrade" feature which makes updating it very easy.
fitsumbelay 1y ago
Fond memories of PirateBox. Actually, fondness is directly proportional to which router I was hacking - Thumbs down for TP-Link - Many thumbs up for the GLI AR150, the sweetest of spots (hugging face emoji)
_giorgio_ 1y ago
Is the router only available on AliExpress? No EU vendor? Apparently the firmware is shipped without the GUI (LUCI). And only 900 units have been sold in 10 months. Something fishy is going on. https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/1h0pkbw/openwrt_one_reviews/ https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/1h0pkbw/openwrt_on...
- haukem 1y ago
  Sorry, we know that the EU and NA distribution channels are not so good. The OpenWrt project depends on Banana Pi here. There are some resellers on Amazon. About 10k OpenWrt one units were sold as of today. The first 900 were sold in about 3 days.
  - _giorgio_ 1y ago
    Thanks a lot. Can you please tell me if the router Luci-html-gui is available by default? I'd like to just point my browser to an 192... and configure it, thanks.
greyw 1y ago
All my accesspoints and routers run OpenWRT. Love it. At some point I even ported OpenWRT to my unsupported tplink device. IIRC I hacked together a devicetree and made some small modifications to the tplink loader code. Funnily enough when I made a PR on github it was basically ignored after I implemented the feedback. I proceed to instead send the patch to the mailinglist and it was merged the same day without comment. That must be some kind of skill filter...
giulianob 1y ago
I just started using OpenWrt on Incus via LXC and it works really well. The most difficult part was just learning the config file. It looks like upgrading OpenWrt (esp. on LXC) is the tricky part though so not looking forward to that. I considered moving it to a VM so upgrading it is easier but it runs so smooth on Incus.
kalleboo 1y ago
I'm a huge fan of OpenWrt. When I got 10 Gbit internet at home I had to replace my old Ubiquiti USG3 on the cheap so I built a router out of a $80 Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny. I tried OPNsense and pfSense on advice but they could never crack around 5 Gbps throughput even with a bunch of tweaking, but OpenWrt gave me the full 10 gbps out of the box with no hassles. I also replaced the Ubiquiti firmware on an EdgeRouter with OpenWrt and it boosted the throughput from around 1.3 Gbps to 1.7 Gbps. The OpenWrt UI for configuring the firewall is probably one of my favorite firewall UIs of all time. Before OpenWrt I could never wrap my head around those "local" etc ruleset names in more traditional routers, I had to look them up again every time I edited the config. Just being able to say "I have these networks, let this one do this to that one" is very easy to understand.
stonecharioteer 1y ago
I switched from an ARM version of Openwrt on my Linkstar H68K to a Beelink EQI12 powered Proxmox instance running Openwrt on a VM. Used ChatGPT to debug it and set up multi-wan failover for it. Works excellently.
Milpotel 1y ago
Unfortunately, they use Busybox under the hood with its plethora of unfixed bugs and security issues and a bug tracker that is almost always down. I cannot trust this project anymore and stopped using systems based on it.

271 points by pykello 1y ago

esseph 1y ago

A lot of companies were built on this.

nine_k 1y ago
It's fun to see that "Amazon choice" portable routers are based on OpenWRT, and run OpenVPN and Wireguard out of the box.
aftbit 1y ago
The first DJI drones (original Phantom at least) used OpenWRT on their "Range Extender" boxes.
shadowgovt 1y ago
And all it took was forcing one company to divulge its proprietary closed-source codebase because they screwed up and incorporated copyleft code deep into their core. Imagine how much progress could be made if a few other companies were forced to crack open their proprietary closed-source codebases...
- bobmcnamara 1y ago
  I think many companies saw that and poopood GPL firmware.
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    They were poopooing that before the OpenWRT case. I don't think there's evidence to suggest that the OpenWRT case made them less willing to use GPL (especially since use of GPL would always have implied they should open-source the firmware derived from it).
    - bobmcnamara 1y ago
      Until then, some companies didn't seem to take it too seriously.
CursedSilicon 1y ago
Ubiquiti uses a fork of OpenWRT. Starlink's routers run it as well. I'm sure a ton of other vendors are using it
- wtallis 1y ago
  The WiFi silicon vendors seem to base their SDK/reference software on OpenWRT (albeit often badly-outdated versions), so almost everyone selling a WiFi box ends up using some variant or fork of OpenWRT. It's been a long time since the days of Linksys trying to cut DRAM costs by using something other than Linux. There are still exceptions like MikroTik where the OS and configuration tools are a main selling point (still Linux-based, but not OpenWRT).
- gh02t 1y ago
  Where does Ubiquiti use OpenWRT? I saw that claim elsewhere in this thread but I'm pretty sure their original devices were based on Vyatta, and their newer stuff is a custom Linux OS of their own that is loosely Debian-flavored. Poking around in the terminal all the Ubiquiti devices I have used are very clearly unrelated to OpenWRT.
  - esseph 1y ago
    Ubiquiti started in outdoor wireless, point to point and point to multipoint. All their outdoor radios, cameras, and unifi APs are all running a version of openwrt. EdgeRouters started on vayatta and then that went away (AT&T acquired Vayatta) and then that forked into VyOS. Some of the Ubiquiti EdgeSwitches are running some other OS, but I can't remember what it was. Source - Spent 14 years helping alpha / beta test, debug code and wireless problems, etc.
haukem 1y ago
I assume that about 20% to 50% of the home routers, Access points and Wifi mesh devices sold world wide are based on OpenWrt. Often some old versions of OpenWrt with many vendor modifications, the UI is always custom. I know that the main vendor SDKs from Qualcomm, Mediatek, and Maxlinear are based on OpenWrt. I think only Broadcom uses an own Linux distribution which is not based on OpenWrt in their main SDK. Linux has a market share of about 99% in this market, I haven't seen VxWorks in any recent home router or access point.

realz 1y ago

What’s new with OpenWrt?

esafak 1y ago
Apparently they released a router last year.
- pseudosavant 1y ago
  This is actually probably the best thing OpenWRT have done in quite a while. I got two (one for a backup) and I've been super happy. I've happily used TP-Link, GL.iNet, and Raspberry Pi 4 devices, with OpenWRT in the past, but nothing beats the "it just works" aspect of a first party device designed for this, fully open, and a reasonable price. Most off-the-shelf devices have too slow of CPU for a low latency/buffer router. The Raspberry Pi 4 is easily fast enough but needs to use USB3 network adapters which require packages not in the default rpi4 OpenWRT image. Not insurmountable, but a consistent pain every upgrade.
  - aftbit 1y ago
    I ended up building my own image of OpenWRT to make the package hell better on upgrade, and as a bonus, I was able to build in my configs too. Recovering from a failed Pi was as simple as flashing the most-recently-built image. Upgrading just required rebuilding the image (and resolving whatever went wrong, of course, though it was usually pretty light). As a bonus, it's easy to swap SD cards on the Pi so I can have the last "known good" config available while taking the update. Now I run OpenWRT on one of those x86 mini PC boxes with 4x 2.5GBe Intel NICs because my wirespeed is 2 Gbps symmetric, so I needed just a bit more oomph than the Pi could provide. The hardware is somehow even _less_ reliable than a Pi 4 - I'm already on my third machine in 3 years. I would love to find something more reliable.
    - pseudosavant 1y ago
      OpenWRT has also made it incredibly easy to package in any arbitrary pkg into image downloads from their website. You don't need your own build infrastructure now. I'm curious what your experience would be like with a Pi5/CM5 solution using PCIe for your ethernet. It is pretty easy to have spare boards and SD cards around for Pi setups. I've had good reliability with Pi setups using good passive cooling (no fan to die).

_mu 1y ago

all my routers run TOMATO

champtar 1y ago
Curious what are the main benefits ? (I've only ever used DD-WRT and OpenWrt)
- ZenoArrow 1y ago
  I use Tomato too, but I wouldn't say it offers many benefits over OpenWrt. The main thing is that routers based on Broadcom chipsets often only work with very old Linux kernels (such as 2.6.xx kernels), as the drivers are closed source. For these routers, the primary third-party router OS choice is to use Tomato.
poisonborz 1y ago
Apples and oranges. It is a nice tool for closed-source Broadcom devices that OpenWRT will never support. Otherwise it has nowhere near the complexity and features.
Bender 1y ago
All of mine are Alpine Linux. No UI but small, simple.
- opan 1y ago
  Have you written anything about setting this up somewhere?
  - Bender 1y ago
    I have not but if there was enough interest I could make a rough go at it. It's not a very complicated setup. It's basically Alpine Linux with some custom sysctl and interface settings, sch_cake with custom settings, cdg, netfilter, Unbound DNS with some local zones for limited spam filtering and a cron based refresh of common domain names, blackhole routes for known clowns and DoH/DoT IP addresses, chronyd for NTP, dnsmasq for static and dynamic DHCP, gratuitous arp cron job to lower latency and steal back my IP if someone tries to take it and restore quickly from ISP router failover all running on a Protectli VPN class small business firewall with cron snapshots/backups from another node. My first pass would probably just be a static page with linked text files of the configurations and a brief synopsis of what each file or in some cases individual settings are performing.

xattt 1y ago

I do find it sad/ironic/interesting to note that the router that started it all is no longer supported. Not to bell the cat, but some sort of symbolic build for the WRT54G(L) should still be possible… right?

gforce_de 1y ago
You can build the image yourself, but have to switch off some packages or features - otherwise the image (linux-kernel + tools) is just too large or consumes too much memory. The original router has 8 megabytes RAM-memory and 2 Megabytes flash ("storage"). You can boot a recent kernel 6.16.5, but with 8mb there is not much left to work with 8-) A starter is here: https://intercity-vpn.de/files/openwrt/wrt54gtest/minimal/ https://intercity-vpn.de/files/openwrt/wrt54gtest/minimal/
- aftbit 1y ago
  I remember swapping the TSOP packages on a WRT54 to double the RAM. Here's a blog post about this, not sure if it was the same one I followed: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2010/09/upgrading-ram-in-wrt54gv2.html https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2010/09/upgrading-ram-in-w...
mac-attack 1y ago
My uneducated guess is that that people that want this kind of symbolism aren't willing to actually become a maintainer and invest time in niche code for a declining user base?
- xattt 1y ago
  Hence belling the cat

mifydev 1y ago

OpenWRT is such a good os for a router - simple but configurable UI, works reliably, I wish router companies would just ship it by default

mifydev 1y ago
But then you get annoying firmware providers like Broadcom who refuse to write OSS drivers for linux and a lot of work is being spent on the reverse engineering
- echelon 1y ago
  Can we accept a pragmatic world where we have OSS + binary blobs? That's better than a fully commercial world or a fully "pure" world with no functionality.
  - mifydev 1y ago
    I would love that, but it seems like they are not doing that either
  - wtallis 1y ago
    GPU vendors have come to the realization that the in-kernel driver needs to be open-source, but the userspace portion can be closed-source. There's just really no good reason to accept a design where outdated closed-source drivers could keep you from running a current kernel. WiFi NIC vendors have for generations been moving more complexity into the closed-source firmware blob that runs on the NIC's own processor core(s), so there's no good reason for the kernel driver to remain closed-source.
    - zokier 1y ago
      Broadcom has been doing FullMAC designs for over a decade now, and that is exactly what you describe: moving all the functionality into firmware and having thin opensource kernel driver
  - opan 1y ago

aborsy 1y ago

Couldn’t developers of OpenWRT come up with a better UI? It’s not user friendly at all.

mzajc 1y ago
Please for the love of all that is good do not change/remove the Bootstrap 2 LuCI theme. It's such a great and pragmatic design.
- aborsy 1y ago
  I come from OPNSense (different use case). Nice well-designed robust UI, even if people say opnsense is flexible and thus complex. Given that, I feel GL-inet users rarely visit the advanced section (Luci).
wtallis 1y ago
Could you provide any specifics? Are you wanting a dumbed-down UI that hides most of the functionality, or are you wanting the existing functionality to be exposed to the user differently?
- aborsy 1y ago
  See https://www.wundertech.net/opnsense-vs-openwrt/ https://www.wundertech.net/opnsense-vs-openwrt/ To be clear, OpenWRT is a great OS. The UI is a bit old fashioned, existing functionality could be exposed more cleanly, and the terminology could be more intuitive. This is basically what gl-inet did! You can compare how they expose functionality. Of course, it’s limited, but eventually the remaining features in LUCI could be incorporated in the same UI.
gardnr 1y ago
What is your point of reference? What would you compare it to? I find it easy to understand and to use. From my outside perspective it seems like basically just Linux with a nice web UI.
numpad0 1y ago

rdtsc 1y ago

OpenWrt is what I use. I picked my routers specifically to be well supported by OpenWrt, immediately wiped whatever the original firmware and installed OpenWrt and that was about ten years ago. Then when I replaced the hardware I also looked for a compatible model with OpenWrt and did the same. I never had any issue with OpenWrt which I couldn't solve and it just works. Its uptime is pretty much the uptime since when the power goes out due to storms and such.

gardnr 1y ago
I have my fibre ont and the wifi router on a cheap battery backup. It has always continued to work even during extended power outages.
opan 1y ago
Seconding all this. Ever since I had weird problems with the vendor firmware on a router, I just pick hardware I can put OpenWrt on right away. Works great.
Viability1936 1y ago
What hardware did you go with? I was thinking of getting the second most recent glinet to run openwrt, but haven't convinced myself it's worth it since my current tplink is still pretty new and is just be getting it to tinker (I don't currently even run any vlans or anything fancy)
- rdtsc 1y ago
  I went with a TP-Link Archer C7 V2. It's quite dated by now, but it's been sitting quietly in the closet and working for all these years and I am still happy with it. My speeds are also not that fast, I only pay for 100Mbps so something faster might overwhelm this hardware. I also don't have anything fancy on it, no vlans just a few wifi networks on 2.4ghz and 5ghz, some wired devices, and two usb drivers which I access via ssh (these do require I install a few extra packages to allow mounting them).
  - emeril 1y ago

zokier 1y ago

I love OpenWrt. But I wished there was something similar but for "big" (in a relative sense) devices. I feel lot of the constraints OpenWrt is based on are not really that applicable when you have hundreds of megabytes of flash and RAM, and that is starting to become a common thing for routers these days. Even their own OpenWrt One router has 256M flash and a full gigabyte of RAM. That is not all that resource constrained anymore. What I would love is to have something that would be closer to "normal" linux distro while getting the networking goodies and ease of configuration from OpenWrt.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago
Strongly agreed. I'd rather be running a Debian, with systemd, and boring regular utilities, than the bespoke environment openwrt has crafted together. I'm super glad openwrt exists, and their uci config predates systemd's attempt to build a cohesive consistent whole system configuration pattern & is epic, but given the capabilities of these systems it feels so worthwhile to de-specialize the environment, to make it more boring. What I really want is Kubernetes oriented tools that can manage hostapd & something like dawn or openert's usteer for band/ap steering. And some other ancillary wifi tools. Maybe maybe a setup for radius/enterprise, instead of just psk. You can do so much more with it, but at its core openwrt is 90% packaging for openwrt. It's not even particularly super well tuned hostapd: theres so much wireless config one can go try & enable that really is just additional 802.11 specs hostapd supports, they may improve your openwrt wifi experience.
- the_biot 1y ago
  > I'd rather be running a Debian, with systemd, and boring regular utilities, than the bespoke environment openwrt has crafted together. Yup, that's the answer. Debian is rock solid, and a script with a bunch of iptables and iproute2 commands is so much simpler than the mess that is OpenWRT's network setup. I only use it for dumb APs, and even then it's questionable -- the UI is nice, but configuring it is unnecessarily complex IMHO.
- freetime2 1y ago
  > I'd rather be running a Debian, with systemd, and boring regular utilities, than the bespoke environment openwrt has crafted together. I agree. I tried running OpenWrt as a wired router on an x86 mini PC, and found that it had some really powerful features and was certainly rock solid as a router. But there were some major annoyances, too. For example, their documentation includes a script for expanding the root filesystem [1] that left my system unable to boot. And while I didn't use it long enough to make it through an upgrade, their documentation on upgrades makes the process sound very brittle (it sounded like configs for installed packages don't carry over by default) and confusing. I thought about trying to set up an Ubuntu (or other popular distro) box as a router, which I think would be much easier to maintain over time. But my concern is that I might overlook some important config that is set by default in OpenWrt, and leave my machine vulnerable to attack. Having a web UI that I can log into and view/make config changes is also kind of nice. Are there any good out-of-the-box solutions or guides for doing this? (I know that OPNSense/PFSense are really popular among homelab users, but unfortunately the Marvell NICs in my mini PC are not supported in FreeBSD). [1] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/openwrt_x86#expanding_root_filesystem https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/openwrt_x86...

CursedSilicon 1y ago

I'm a staunch defender of OpenWRT. Having used just about every "router distro" folks care to name (remember SmoothWall?) for the last 20~ years, OpenWRT is built like a tank and just keeps trundling along I hope their experiments with the "OpenWRT One" keep going. I'd love to see OpenWRT take a (deserved) bite out of the "SMB firewall vendors" like Netgate or OPNsense. Or just undercutting Wi-Fi vendors like Ubiquiti who base their work on OpenWRT anyway Something I'm excited to try myself in future is running "OpenWISP" [1] to manage a small fleet (three) OpenWRT devices in parallel for a deployment in a shared workshop. This seems to also be something that OpenWRT could be better at integrating, but it's nice to see "a vendor" tackling it [1] https://openwisp.org/ https://openwisp.org/

whalesalad 1y ago
Related, I used to love going to the monowall website gallery to see all the labgore. It's still there like a time capsule: https://m0n0.ch/wall/gallery.php https://m0n0.ch/wall/gallery.php
foepys 1y ago
OpenWISP states in its docs that you should be running at least 20 devices to make it worth it. [1] So it's not supposed to be a easy way to manage a few devices for home users. > However, OpenWISP may not be the best fit for very small networks (fewer than 20 devices), organizations lacking IT expertise, or enterprises seeking open-source alternatives solely for cost-saving purposes. 1: https://openwisp.org/faq/#suitable https://openwisp.org/faq/#suitable
- CursedSilicon 1y ago
  I saw that. Admittedly I'm only interested in a few of its functions. Namely roaming and guest hotspots I could wire up all of that manually. But I'm excited for the chance to learn something new
- rubenbe 1y ago
  It's for exactly that reason I started with OpenSOHO. It is targeted towards the typical home and small office network with less than 20 OpenWRT devices. (although there is no hard limit). https://github.com/rubenbe/opensoho https://github.com/rubenbe/opensoho It is still a work in progress, but it is easy to deploy (one golang binary based on pocketbase)

fiatjaf 1y ago

An easy-to-setup OpenWrt-based plugin to sell internet for satoshis: https://tollgate.me/ https://tollgate.me/

hd4 1y ago

Installed it on a TP-Link to replace my ISP router a couple days ago. I'm super impressed with how it needed almost no config (except to manually activate the Wifi and to set a password). I'd recommend downloading the Material theme for anyone complaining about the barebones look.

rolph 1y ago
about your TPLINK, there is often a "recovery feature", an alternate boot partition [ i posted about this some time ago.] if you configure your router so that it "bricks" you can boot in the last working configuration before your changes; rescue; and save to overwrite the brick partition. presumably you can do this forever, as long as you dont brick both partitions. 3 interrupted boot cycles would cause a switch to last successful boot partition. in my case i had problems because of the curious way we have power failures here. the power would brown out and each phase of generation would send a peak and trough, equivalent to turning power on then off before boot completion 3 times. if you want to be snazzy, you can play on this and work two partitions at once each configured for different purpose, and accessed by briskly cycling power thrice.

JimmaDaRustla 1y ago

I used DD-WRT forever, but holy crap was it buggy. Once I tried OpenWRT, there was no going back. Shit just works, and works well.

petcat 1y ago
Tomato on the WRT-54G was the all time best in my opinion.
- tracker1 1y ago
  Agreed... probably the best experience for a SOHO router+wifi. I currently use OpnSense on an N305 mini pc for my router and the separate wifi AP has it's own management interface. Works for my needs.
bobmcnamara 1y ago
I tried setting it up as a test router and ran smack into their ancient kernel and iptables not supporting statistics drop mode.
shrx 1y ago
Interesting, on my latest router (WRT3200ACM) I've had the opposite experience - I had to switch from OpenWRT to DD-WRT since the former was too buggy to use (couldn't get the WiFi to work reliably).

drnick1 1y ago

Another option (depending on your requirements) is to use normal "workstation" Linux distro like Debian on an regular x86 PC equipped with two NICs. I added an SFP28 dual NIC to an old gaming PC and now use it as a router/home server and can saturate the link (25Gbps). I get north of 4Gbps through Wireguard too. Routing and the firewall are built into the kernel so you don't really need a specific distro. I just added a DNS server (Unbound in recursive mode) and a DHCP server. For WiFi I use hostapd, but an external AP would be a better solution for most people.

nicolas314 1y ago
Did you manage to get IPv6 prefix delegation working with dynamic prefixes? Best solution I found involves scripting to re-build config files and restart a daemon, where OpenWRT just does it out of the box.
- drnick1 1y ago
  I have a public IPv4 so I did not have to deal with that fortunately, but can you not emulate what OpenWrt does? It's based on Linux after all.

Ms-J 1y ago

Can anyone recommend a guide on the firewall?

mac-attack 1y ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DWmLVDAV5kY https://youtube.com/watch?v=DWmLVDAV5kY His content helped me when I first made the plunge into OpenWRT earlier this year and realized I knew next to nothing about networking. He also has a video on policy-based routing that is cited in the PBR documentation as well.
- adolph 1y ago
  Thanks, I'm looking forward to watching. I was totally frustrated by implementing DNS+IP parental controls on OpenWRT and am interested if there is better tooling now. My recollection is that there are multiple wrappers of configuration behind the webUI and trying to run AdGuard home on the same hardware lead to performance problems.
  - wernerb 1y ago
    Install Adguard home on it

RomanPushkin 1y ago

Big fan of it. Allows you to create experimental software for OpenWrt, like I did: https://github.com/ro31337/big-internet-button?tab=readme-ov-file#why-this-exists https://github.com/ro31337/big-internet-button?tab=readme-ov... > In our hyper-connected world, we've become slaves to the endless scroll. Social media, news, videos - the algorithm-driven content feeds are designed to capture and hold our attention indefinitely. We tell ourselves "just 5 more minutes" but hours disappear. Our brains are being rewired for constant stimulation, making us less capable of deep thought, genuine connection, and meaningful work. > The Big Internet Button breaks this cycle by introducing friction back into your internet consumption.

peanut-walrus 1y ago

Openwrt still has some strange footguns (imo) and the upgrade process is painful. I personally just prefer running general-purpose distros for my routing and firewalling needs. I realize the learning curve for this for someone who just wants a home router is unrealistic though :) But out of all the router/firewall distros, OpenWRT it is by far the best.

horrorente 1y ago
I just recently started using OpenWRT and only have done one upgrade, but I‘ve found it really straightforward using Attended Sysupgrade https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/attended.sysupgrade https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/attended.sy...

mikepurvis 1y ago

Been a fan for a long time and use it on my Archer C7, but I had to disable hardware switching in order to use SQM, and now the switching performance is <200mbps. Having recently upgraded to home fiber, I'm probably going to get a native Unifi router.

NoiseBert69 1y ago
Maybe have a look at Intel n100 boxes (Aliexpress -> Topton). They often have 4-5x 2.5GE Ports with high quality Intel cards. They are very cheap (100-200€) and suck not too much current (5-15W). You can run OpenWRT on them using the x86 build. We usually have 5-10x of them around for emergency network tasks if everything burns down in a building.
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  Honestly it is tempting. I do have an old Haswell-era industrial motherboard that would manage the task just fine, and I've definitely considered this path. That said, I'd probably spend about as much on a power supply, case, and NIC for that machine as I would on just buying a Unifi gateway, and theirs comes with an integrated UI for the APs. I'm past the stage of life where I find joy in tinkering with the infrastructure I need to do my job (WFH) so I'll probably still just go off the shelf.
wernerb 1y ago
I bought a Fujitsu Futron S920 second hand for like 30 euros. Put a dual NIC PCI in there and now have a low watt router running very fast. Can easily run 1Gbit up and down

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

Openwrt is amazing. I had a wrt54gs, and then latter got a Netgear wgt634u with an astounding USB2 port! Served as a great office shoutcast playing server for the office, a decade before Sonos (for example) existed. The hardware situation has felt very tenuous for years now. Qualcomm support has felt so so bodged in. It feels perpetually like "this new chipset will finally get us past all the horrible half working hacks of the last barely working chipset" on and on, usually sort of working but only barely. I did finally get my IPQ8074A based router going (rax120) but it took so long, and needs an older wifi firmware (their 2.7) to work. But it feels like maybe slowly it could be getting better, maybe perhaps support will be more mainline less hacked next time. One very recent example that's lovely to see is Qualcomm starting to mainline their Packet Processing Engine, for the IPQ9574 at least. Link and example hardware below. There have been various forks of openwrt that bundle in cobbled together versions of the software to use hardware offload/accelerators, lots of these. But it's been far from problemfree and are hard to maintain, especially trying to maintain kernel compatibility. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-PPE-Driver-Linux-6.18 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-PPE-Driver-Linux-6.18 https://www.524wifi.com/index.php/embedded-cpu-boards/dual-radio-boards/dr9574-802-11be-wifi-7-multifunction-main-board-qualcomm-ipq-9574-4x4-mu-mimo-ofmda-wi-fi-7-wallys-alder.html https://www.524wifi.com/index.php/embedded-cpu-boards/dual-r... https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ipq806x-nss-build-netgear-r7800-tp-link-c2600-linksys-ea8500/82525?page=76 https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ipq806x-nss-build-netgear-r7800-... It's good to see MediaTek present in openwrt space. One of the only other highly present chipsets available. The price is often quite good for pretty new wifi standard supporting routers. The anec-data I've heard is that driver maturity is not great, but at least there's motion & movement within the kernel, which springs hope eternal.

rkagerer 1y ago

I've been following OpenWRT for years, and finally made the jump. This was after using DD-WRT and various flavors of Tomato (especially Shibby and FreshTomato) for two decades on probably ~100 routers in various locations. Some of those locations were business production environments, with the routers providing VPN connecting sites across the continent as a backbone for VOIP telephony, remote user access, etc. (before the likes of Tailscale). It's an important project and I have a great appreciation for all the work the developers have put into it. But I have to admit, I was underwhelmed. LuCI wasn't as robust as I expected (the "queue all your changes as a batch of commands" approach is a great idea, but its implementation has some rough edges that simply don't work - IIRC, where the UI isn't aware of conflicting config changes you've already queued). And I found in practice getting it to do things that are easy and reliable on FreshTomato, was frustratingly unintuitive, taking more steps than I'd expect, some seeming brittle/error-prone. I'm not averse to scripting, having written short novels of commands for previous OS's, and even custom-compiled binaries (e.g. to install iPerf, before it was bundled with the OS) and a whole custom FreshTomato build that added some admin pages for long-term bandwidth/latency graphing. So I'm open to learning new things, I just felt like I was doing more fighting with the OS than should be necessary. One small example was configuring a Let's Encrypt certificate. This feels like it should be a near one-click operation. In my case it took a bit of testing and tweaking to get right - I wound up contributing my short solution back to a SuperUser answer: https://superuser.com/a/1904844/75522 https://superuser.com/a/1904844/75522 Properly disabling IPv6 took more than just a checkbox. I had "No default route present, overriding ra_lifetime to 0!" messages logged, until I added "net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1" to /etc/sysctl.conf. Maybe I'm just getting snagged by doing things in 'weird' ways. e.g. My inaugural router on it is a MikroTik wAP ac. Turns out you don't get a WAN interface out of the box when flashed on that device, and I had to manually create it. There wasn't really any documentation warning about that, and it took a while before I realized life would go better if I used a lowercase rather than uppercase convention (for better integration with built-in stuff that relies on its existence). A lingering issue I haven't figured out yet is how to make a reliable "toggle switch" to turn on and off access to the internet for one device on my network (by IP or MAC address). I set up a firewall rule, but wind up having to manually run "/etc/init.d/firewall reload" and "conntrack -D ..." each time to kill any established connections. On FreshTomato it was just a checkbox you turn on/off. If anyone has advice on this I'd be grateful. One last tip for anyone else using it on a router plugged into a Starlink endpoint that's in bypass mode (i.e. you want to be able to port forward). You'll get messages in syslog every 5 minutes due to short-lived Starlink IP: daemon.notice netifd: wan (####): udhcpc: sending renew to server daemon.notice netifd: wan (####): udhcpc: lease of ###.###.###.# obtained from ###.###.###.#, lease time 300 You can suppress them by appending "-l 1" (without quotes) to the "procd_set_param command /sbin/netifd" line in /etc/init.d/network, then reboot the router (in my case running "/etc/init.d/network reload" didn't quite do it). On the plus side, the Dynamic DNS package is working well in my setup. (And yes, I understand the implications of using Let's Encrypt on a DDNS IP). I'm not here to whine, just to suggest that anyone else thinking of making the switch manage your expectations and leave yourself some time to perfect things and get used to the new platform.

simonmorley 1y ago

RIP Cucumber Tony.

shmerl 1y ago

OpenWRT is really cool. I recently figured out it has an "attended upgrade" feature which makes updating it very easy.

fitsumbelay 1y ago

Fond memories of PirateBox. Actually, fondness is directly proportional to which router I was hacking - Thumbs down for TP-Link - Many thumbs up for the GLI AR150, the sweetest of spots (hugging face emoji)

_giorgio_ 1y ago

Is the router only available on AliExpress? No EU vendor? Apparently the firmware is shipped without the GUI (LUCI). And only 900 units have been sold in 10 months. Something fishy is going on. https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/1h0pkbw/openwrt_one_reviews/ https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/1h0pkbw/openwrt_on...

haukem 1y ago
Sorry, we know that the EU and NA distribution channels are not so good. The OpenWrt project depends on Banana Pi here. There are some resellers on Amazon. About 10k OpenWrt one units were sold as of today. The first 900 were sold in about 3 days.
- _giorgio_ 1y ago
  Thanks a lot. Can you please tell me if the router Luci-html-gui is available by default? I'd like to just point my browser to an 192... and configure it, thanks.

greyw 1y ago

All my accesspoints and routers run OpenWRT. Love it. At some point I even ported OpenWRT to my unsupported tplink device. IIRC I hacked together a devicetree and made some small modifications to the tplink loader code. Funnily enough when I made a PR on github it was basically ignored after I implemented the feedback. I proceed to instead send the patch to the mailinglist and it was merged the same day without comment. That must be some kind of skill filter...

giulianob 1y ago

I just started using OpenWrt on Incus via LXC and it works really well. The most difficult part was just learning the config file. It looks like upgrading OpenWrt (esp. on LXC) is the tricky part though so not looking forward to that. I considered moving it to a VM so upgrading it is easier but it runs so smooth on Incus.

kalleboo 1y ago

I'm a huge fan of OpenWrt. When I got 10 Gbit internet at home I had to replace my old Ubiquiti USG3 on the cheap so I built a router out of a $80 Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny. I tried OPNsense and pfSense on advice but they could never crack around 5 Gbps throughput even with a bunch of tweaking, but OpenWrt gave me the full 10 gbps out of the box with no hassles. I also replaced the Ubiquiti firmware on an EdgeRouter with OpenWrt and it boosted the throughput from around 1.3 Gbps to 1.7 Gbps. The OpenWrt UI for configuring the firewall is probably one of my favorite firewall UIs of all time. Before OpenWrt I could never wrap my head around those "local" etc ruleset names in more traditional routers, I had to look them up again every time I edited the config. Just being able to say "I have these networks, let this one do this to that one" is very easy to understand.

stonecharioteer 1y ago

I switched from an ARM version of Openwrt on my Linkstar H68K to a Beelink EQI12 powered Proxmox instance running Openwrt on a VM. Used ChatGPT to debug it and set up multi-wan failover for it. Works excellently.

Milpotel 1y ago

Unfortunately, they use Busybox under the hood with its plethora of unfixed bugs and security issues and a bug tracker that is almost always down. I cannot trust this project anymore and stopped using systems based on it.