OpenWrt

“Your TV is probably just one of the many devices that sends a scary amount of requests to a bunch of shady servers.”

“use openwrt and refuse to allow any outbound data from any IP using the MAC address of the television set”

“I got fed up of finding the correct hardware revision of a particular router that supports OpenWRT”

“This is a real pain point with OpenWRT, made worse by the developers' concept that there are "proper" ways to do it”

“suggested enlisting an IT person to stick a cheap OpenWRT router with Tailscale in front to protect it”

“I only wish more of them were actually mainline openWRT so the updates from the project were guaranteed.”

“Having a hardware device that runs OpenWRT to do this would, as far as I can tell, be perfect for this”

“Availability of an OpenWrt port is the first thing I check when looking for network hardware”

“it presents a very usable GUI straight away these days and it has a ton of flexibility for getting creative later”

“OpenWrt (and, by extension, GL.iNet) explicitly refuses to forward .lan DNS queries to public resolvers. This is a good thing”

“You can actually ditch the GUI and go to the command line with OpenWrt and do custom/weird/power-user stuff to your heart's content.”

“Linux and OpenWrt have an incredibly good security record compared to what ships on typical consumer devices.”

“OpenWRT is amazing. Other than the usual security stuff one of the most overlooked use cases was scheduling other devices.”

“use their hardware list to pick a consumer router with the feature set you need that can be flashed to use openWrt”

“Every time I updated OpenWRT there was some gotcha that created an unexpected headache”

“It's easy to customize, I have a script to notify me when a new device connects to my router”

“There are too many settings. Feels like Gimp (vs paintbrush). But once figured out, it works well.”

“Apart from installation and upgrades, the OS itself is nice, very flexible and capable.”

“With OpenWRT, the network interfaces are whatever you want them to be. That's one of the perks.”

“The documentation seems to be all over the map, and the GUI suggests using "attended sysupgrade" for upgrades.”

“I do run OpenWrt on my x86-based router, on my AP, and even on my managed switches, and have no regrets.”

“I agree on the upgrade story, though supposedly the recent move to apk will help in that regard.”

“OpenWRT has been in deep woes, has been having incredibly hard time supporting routers”

“If it's a "router" and you can't install a OpenWRT on it, then it's an absolute no-brainer to not to buy it.”

“I travel with a OpenWRT router runnning a Tailscale pipe to my basement. Get to travel with US media access.”

“OpenWRT updates are very much discouraged on an ongoing basis primarily because most devices running it use very cheap flash chips”

“I just reset the router, actually took the time to do everything by the docs, and then it worked.”

“I have only used OpenWRT on a high end consumer router (GL.inet MT6000) out of those. That works well”

“Whereas OpenWrt I have to look at their list of supported machines, and buy exactly that one, even down to the hardware rev.”

“put OpenWRT on it and bam! High performance, high quality router built from trustworthy parts running open source operating system”

“optimizing coverage by adjusting signal strength and channels is left for experienced users to deal with manually”

“I had to install openwrt on my router so that I could restrict access to upnp by mac address”

“Replacing the vendor firmware with vanilla OpenWRT, when possible, will reduce a lot of risk.”

“I stick with things like Latvian-built Mikrotik hardware or something running OpenWRT for my own travel router uses.”

“all I have to do is tell my router which offset to give my subnets from the prefix and it does the rest”

“OpenWRT solved the problem of updates via immutable firmware image flashing while maintaining customizations”

“OpenWRT has the default of WiFi off for security, which means that if the config is somehow hosed and you have to hard reset the router, you now have an inaccessible brick”

“shop for devices that support OpenWRT or DD-WRT to help future proof your firmware experience”

“the firmware is going to be (relatively) top-notch and free of major bugs and major security exploits”

“This has let me do whatever I've imagined wanting so far with VLANs, SSIDs, routing, firewalling”