I am looking for a router, and OpenWRT came up. I was looking at their table of hardware and the ASUS RT-AC3100 seemed like a good option, as its cheap used, (~$40 USD) and supported by the latest OpenWRT version.
Thing is, its EOL, per Asus. Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?
Is there a way to see or estimate when a router will no longer work on OpenWRT?
FWIW I bought an N100 mini pc with 2 nics for ~100eur and use it as an openwrt router. It’s so easy and simple IDK why more people don’t recommend it.
I mean, the mini PCs don’t come with a managed switch, and often without good wireless connectivity that most home routers will come equipped with. So in total with Wi-Fi APs and a decent switch, definitely more than €100 in total.
Also unrelated, but if you’re running a x86 system with gigabytes of RAM, why not run Opnsense at that point?
I believe it’s gotten better but historically *BSD had poor SQM support (bufferbloat mitigation), which is particularly useful on slower, asymmetric connections and where low, consistent latency is paramount.
It was also a bit of a laggard on Wireguard support, although that’s long since been fixed. So mainly you might prefer OpenWRT if you want the Linux kernel which tends to get features more quickly. Also because it’s so low on resource usage (including disk space), you can put it in a VM and very rapidly recover in the case of issues.
You could of course also use a full Linux based router OS, but I don’t believe there are many with a web interface, which most users would prefer.
Yeah, not having cake sqm is the one thing that will probably kill Opnsense as a choice for some people. That’s not to say you cannot get excellent results with fq_codel, because you absolutely can (I actively use both OpenWRT and OPNSense on different network applications personally). It is definitely more work to get good results though. OPNSense’s wireguard support has been excellent for a number of years now, and it’s exclusively what I use for tunneling in a VPC I rent.
If you’re particularly constricted on host hardware and need a lightweight router to manage multiple other VMs on said host, I could definitely see the benefits of running a minimal OpenWRT over OPNSense in that case.
I have other issues with opnsense lately but it has some sort of bufferbloat mitigation that seemed good enough. On the 1000mbps from isp I get 0ms latency increase at the expense of like 100mbps, or 0ms average with some spikes with a 50mbps loss. Can it be done without any download reduction?
As for opensense, I just like openwrt better. Also yeah sure I bought a dumb switch and a standalone access point (some zyxel also running openwrt) for an extra ~120eur total but that’s a whole setup and it works quite well.
How is x86 openwrt? I’ve been on opnsense but my APs are openwrt and maybe I’m remembering wrong after a long time of not touching the management page but I could have sworn it used to detail what rate cables connect at and it doesn’t seem to any more without unrememberable shell commands, and at some point my lan domains stopped working, among other minor annoyances I could also swear are new since my absence.