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TP-Link makes really solid products, and if you don’t want to use their firmware then almost all of them can easily flash OpenWRT. In fact most of their routers
by chatmasta 1y ago
TP-Link makes really solid products, and if you don’t want to use their firmware then almost all of them can easily flash OpenWRT. In fact most of their routers are built from OpenWRT anyway.
I installed their mesh Wi-Fi system for my parents recently and was really impressed how seamless the process was. It did involve making a cloud account which I wasn’t thrilled about, however.
- forinti 1y agoTP-Link let me down twice. I bought a cellphone from them many years ago and they never really supported it and I couldn't even buy a replacement battery. Recently I bought a router with the firm intent of installing OpenWRT, but I received a newer revision that had a different CPU, less RAM, and less flash memory. These events left a bad impression, but they do make affordable stuff with reasonable quality.
- mbreese 1y ago> Recently I bought a router with the firm intent of installing OpenWRT, but I received a newer revision that had a different CPU, less RAM, and less flash memory. This also happened many years ago with Linksys (prior to Cisco). It’s not that uncommon for manufacturers to release new revisions of hardware without necessarily making it clear to the purchaser. If their purpose is to deliver a router and they can shave a few cents off the BOM with less RAM, but it still works with their software, why would they care. And once new revisions have been released into the supply chain, it can be hard to know exactly what version you are buying. In the Linksys case, IIRC they eventually re-released the first revision WRT54G as the WRT54GL (for Linux), so that people who wanted different firmware could get the exact hardware they wanted.
- myself248 1y agoWouldn't it be nice if that was illegal? Sell whatever, but label it accurately, it's different hardware so it needs to have a different version label in the listing or something. We see this all the time with SSDs, where a high-spec model is released to reviewers, then a low-spec model is mass-produced and sold under the same model number. That's fraud, isn't it? Shouldn't it be?
- cesarb 1y ago> but label it accurately, it's different hardware so it needs to have a different version label In my experience, TP-Link always has the hardware revision on a label on the outside of the box.
- tpmoney 1y agoIt’s only fraud if they sold you or marketed to you on those specs. But at least for things like reflashing your router, short of a few explicit opener vendors (like glinet) and Linksys AFTER releasing the WRTGL version, router manufacturers aren’t usually advertising on how much ram or flash memory space they have, any more than car manufacturers are advertising how much flash memory is in their ECUs. It’s not an intended or marketed purpose, so they’re not going to be changing model numbers just because they made an internal update.
- Dylan16807 1y agoChanging the flash in a router is pretty understandable. Changing a router's CPU is going to affect core performance, and so does changing parts in an SSD, and core performance should totally count as being used to sell the product.
- necovek 1y agoBut you can optimize software and use slower hardware to maintain the same performance, as an example.
- Loughla 1y agoHey, that's really timely for me. I'm getting ready to set a mesh network for my older parents as well. Do you have any suggestions for hardware and software? I live a ways away from them so I need this to be pretty much faultless. I don't want to drive 4 hours for IT support.
- travoc 1y agoASUS routers with Merlin firmware work well in a mesh configuration.
- chatmasta 1y agoThe TP-Link option was great. If it was for myself, I'd build my own with OpenWRT but my goal was to minimize the chance of downtime in case I'm not available to help debug issues. They already had a TP-Link range extender running for 4+ years without ever needing to touch it, so I figured their mesh network was a good option too.
- slumberlust 1y agoGo unifi and manage it remotely.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoMy paranoia goes against this idea. How sure are you that the remote management is hardened? Assuming that disabling external control is actually effective, that seems like it removes most practical exploits one would encounter. A network configuration for a non technical person should be so simple it does not require regular maintenance.
- jojobas 1y agoAssuming there isn't a hidden little core running a hidden little OS somewhere.
- rs186 1y agoYeah companies should be held guilty unless proven otherwise. Of course you can never actually prove anything, so they are all guilty by default. /s
- heavyset_go 1y agoYou can't bootstrap nearly any embedded ARM SoC and run Linux without running some closed Chinese blob just to bring it up lol
- cyanydeez 1y agoAnd in reverse, you think Palentir has a transparent business model to trust with your data? I don't get why people find china more suspect than most of these billionaire led monopolies buying politicians and laws and spout paranoid gibberish about Christianity and anti Christ etc. Both might be fundamentally evil or being, but they aren't different in danger based solely on how white they are.
- jojobas 1y agoWhat about whataboutism? And yes an American company in cahoots with the government having the ability to snoop on traffic and turn entire networks off, while bad, is nowhere near as bad as a Chinese one having the exact same capability.
- freeopinion 1y agoThe US company and the US government are 1000x more likely to leverage their position in an antagonistic way against US customers.
- 1y ago
- kej 1y agoDo any of TP-Link's mesh routers support OpenWrt? I didn't think there was overlap between the "easy to set up for my parents" and "easy to install custom firmware" subsets.
- chatmasta 1y agoFrom what I could tell in the admin panel, those mesh routers _are_ OpenWRT. And they have an advanced section where you can upload a firmware .bin.
- oever 1y agoOpenWRT runs well on Deco M5 with a custom build. https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ipq4019-adding-support-for-tp-link-deco-m5/85061 https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ipq4019-adding-support-for-tp-li...
- heavyset_go 1y agoYou aren't thinking low enough for firmware. All modern WiFi APs require closed firmware blobs that run below or parallel to OpenWRT. You replacing the router OS with OpenWRT does nothing when the radio has full DMA access and runs its own OS on its own processor. The OpenWRT layer will have no idea what it's running/infiltrating/exfiltrating. I say this as someone who has been running and building OpenWRT forever. It's great but it isn't a panacea.
- chatmasta 1y agoThat's why I bought a PCEngines box (one of the last of their inventory before they went out of business) with completely transparent hardware and no Chinese manufacturer in the supply chain.
- DANmode 1y agoNeat. If it dies tomorrow, what’s next, out of curiosity?
- denkmoon 1y agoFor anyone asking this question I might suggest Protectli. They've got x86 systems with coreboot. That's about as good as you can get these days for open source-ness without going really obscure or outdated. I've got a VP2440 as my router and firewall. You can neuter the intel management engine with coreboot, but there's still going to be firmware blobs somewhere in it, especially if you're trying to build a wifi ap. One of my 2 pcengines APUs has developed an issue with its solder joints I suspect. It hangs at the bootloader unless the unit is already warm. Can't complain at all, it lasted ages and problems like this are just life for things that thermally cycle, it was in a pretty extreme climate for most of its life. Doesn't help with me needing a replacement now pcengines is out of business though, hence getting a protectli box.
- Retz4o4 1y agoThank you! Been liking for replacements like this.
- daneel_w 1y agoAt some point it won't matter that you run OpenWRT on it. Obvious case in point: at a certain point it doesn't matter that you run Linux instead of Windows on your Intel PC, because it'll still be subjected to Intel ME, Intel AMT, Intel SGX and god knows what else.
- adrian_b 1y agoOn a PC, Intel ME and the like can be accessed remotely only through an Intel NIC, which can be avoided by using a PCIe Ethernet card from another manufacturer, if the motherboard does not have such an interface on it. Even many of the Intel Ethernet interfaces are supposed to have the remote access disabled from the factory, but you cannot be certain about this. A more serious problem is caused by the laptops having Intel WiFi, which is difficult to replace. With such a laptop one would have to disconnect the internal antennas and use an external WiFi dongle, to be sure that remote control is not possible.
- ShroudedNight 1y agoAt one point laptop wifi cards seemed to mostly be m.2 cards, which, while not usually trivial, were relatively feasible to swap out. Has that changed?
- Firehawke 1y agoA lot of the time, they lock the slot to only their officially supported modules. Dell is rather notorious for doing that.
- jm4 1y agoI use their Omada stuff for my business. I own a coffee shop where I have a few devices I need online and I provide free WiFi to customers. I needed something where I could run multiple networks, segregate my own devices, support a large number of clients, automatically turn off free wifi outside of business hours, run a captive portal, reserve a minimum amount of bandwidth for my own devices and prioritize my own traffic, etc. It’s absolutely packed with features and costs less than the stuff I run at home. It was a fraction of the cost of the Meraki gear I was considering. The performance is great too. I don’t know how much I trust TP Link, but my risk level is very low. There’s not much an attacker could do if they get on my network. None of my data is accessible on that network and everything important has MFA anyway. The most sensitive things are my POS and menu displays and they are just client devices connecting to the internet. I probably wouldn’t run this stuff in an environment where I had complex security requirements.
- kjellsbells 1y agoI don't think the attackers are after your credit card records as much as they are after using your network as one base amongst thousands of others to perform illicit compute, generate traffic to a victim network, etc. That is: the attack is outbound from you to the victim, not inbound to you as the victim (at least not beyond the initial beachhead).
- msh 1y agoOmada does not really seem cheaper than unifi.