Friendly reminder that OpenWrt supports Raspberry Pi and every Pi from 3 onwards makes for a great, inexpensive router. Adding WiFi can be done with any off-the-shelf WiFi router or access point, brand new or second hand. Since they aren’t exposed to the Internet, remote vulnerabilities are significantly mitigated.
I got fed up with trying to find the right firmware each time. It was too much of a hassle. Then small issues with the one I had… you need an earlier version… I love the idea, it was just a pain.
I thought OpenWRT doesn’t support modems due to licencing issues.
So, I guess you would need a separate modem, or ISP router in bridge mode, or double NAT with OpenWRT being DMZ
Another friendly reminder, enterprise-grade routers like Mikrotik are fantastic. They don’t have wifi builtin, so you may never need to upgrade it if you get fast enough uplink (mine is gigabit, so should be fine). You’ll need a separate AP (I got Ubiquiti). They’re way more feature complete than nonsense like these from ASUS, and they generally have more secure firmware.
If you are willing to spend a bit more upfront, I bought a mini PC in 2017 and installed opnsense on it. It’s still rock solid. For wifi, I use a separate ap (a ubiquity UAP that I bought in 2015) and it is also going strong. Almost a decade of rock solid performance easily beats out any other router I’ve owned in terms of both performance and cost.
Friendly reminder that OpenWrt exists, and is probably safer than the stock firmware in any consumer router.
From a quick look, I see that at least one of the affected models has official OpenWrt support: the RT-AC68U
Friendly reminder that OpenWrt supports Raspberry Pi and every Pi from 3 onwards makes for a great, inexpensive router. Adding WiFi can be done with any off-the-shelf WiFi router or access point, brand new or second hand. Since they aren’t exposed to the Internet, remote vulnerabilities are significantly mitigated.
Yup. I use a CM4 with a DFRobot router board running openwrt. Works great.
I got fed up with trying to find the right firmware each time. It was too much of a hassle. Then small issues with the one I had… you need an earlier version… I love the idea, it was just a pain.
I thought OpenWRT doesn’t support modems due to licencing issues.
So, I guess you would need a separate modem, or ISP router in bridge mode, or double NAT with OpenWRT being DMZ
Another friendly reminder, enterprise-grade routers like Mikrotik are fantastic. They don’t have wifi builtin, so you may never need to upgrade it if you get fast enough uplink (mine is gigabit, so should be fine). You’ll need a separate AP (I got Ubiquiti). They’re way more feature complete than nonsense like these from ASUS, and they generally have more secure firmware.
If you are willing to spend a bit more upfront, I bought a mini PC in 2017 and installed opnsense on it. It’s still rock solid. For wifi, I use a separate ap (a ubiquity UAP that I bought in 2015) and it is also going strong. Almost a decade of rock solid performance easily beats out any other router I’ve owned in terms of both performance and cost.
I can only get merlin on my rt-ax86u pro. Only aimesh for me!