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> I don't know of any reliable alternatives to run as firmware.

It looks like Tomato supports your router, as does dd-wrt.

https://www.myopenrouter.com/b...

https://www.myopenrouter.com/d...

> As far as other brands, I dislike Linksys, especially since the Cisco and Belkin days. The quality is simply not there anymore. Anyone have a good recommendation?

Further up this page someone posted a link to recent routers recommended for Tomato.

> I don't know of any reliable alternatives to run as firmware.

It looks like Tomato supports your router, as does dd-wrt.

https://www.myopenrouter.com/b...

https://www.myopenrouter.com/d...

> As far as other brands, I dislike Linksys, especially since the Cisco and Belkin days. The quality is simply not there anymore. Anyone have a good recommendation?

Further up this page someone posted a link to recent routers recommended for Tomato.

I don't understand why manufacturers insist on bundling their own crappy firmware anyway...

It always has less features than dd-wrt, costs them money to develop and maintain (which they then try to minimize, thus making the firmware even worse), and generates bad publicity when their corner cutting invariably comes back to bite them in the ass through security holes and bad publicity...
They would all be much better off just bundling dd-wrt and using the money they would have spent on development to contribute towards the project and ensure good support for their devices.

Because a lot of the stuff is proprietary to the chipset. DD-WRT and others get the "open source" versions of that code, which for WiFi often means lower throughput, and on the Ethernet side, again, lowered speeds as the accelerators aren't used.

It really boils down to the fact that most of the stuff is made by Broadcom, and they're basically a proprietary company. What little they make open-source is generally poorly performing

Sometimes you get lucky in that Broadcom provides the binary modules as part of the package, so you can get full speed Ethernet and WiFi, but they're binary blobs so you can't peek inside them to see if certain features are supported.

Anyhow, Netgear does have a little open-source support - they do have "Open Source Routers" which do have DD-WRT or Tomato or other firmware available, and I believe they actually support this configuration - their web site is generally up to date on which routers are "open" and have supported DD-WRT and which ones don't. http://www.myopenrouter.com/

Asus generally provides source code and there's a big community around them as well. Everyone else is pretty much forget it.

http://myopenrouter.com/

If you're interested in security, you'll buy a router which you can flash and program to your own liking.

I don't know how to counter a custom spying chip that might be embedded on your router's board, but defeating software is pretty damned easy.

Netgear's fanciest two routers, the R7500 and R8000, aren't yet supported. All we can do is sit and beg Brainslayer or Kong to spend time on them, but they've got a lot of irons in the fire.

Well, the R7000 and R8000 are "open routers" per Netgear. The R7500... not so much.

In fact, the R8000 has a DD-WRT port. As does the R7000.

And while it takes a bit of hunting, Netgear's source code firmware for those are available as well. (Well, most of it, given the amount of proprietary drivers that are binary only).

MyOpenRouter is usually where I go first when deciding if there's a particular Netgear router I want. (Netgear runs the site as a central place for all their "open" routers and alternative firmware. At least the routers they officially support as being "open").

Netgear's fanciest two routers, the R7500 and R8000, aren't yet supported. All we can do is sit and beg Brainslayer or Kong to spend time on them, but they've got a lot of irons in the fire.

Well, the R7000 and R8000 are "open routers" per Netgear. The R7500... not so much.

In fact, the R8000 has a DD-WRT port. As does the R7000.

And while it takes a bit of hunting, Netgear's source code firmware for those are available as well. (Well, most of it, given the amount of proprietary drivers that are binary only).

MyOpenRouter is usually where I go first when deciding if there's a particular Netgear router I want. (Netgear runs the site as a central place for all their "open" routers and alternative firmware. At least the routers they officially support as being "open").

There are several.

The Netgear Nighthawk R7000 has source code available and DD-WRT support. The Asus RT-AC68U likewise has a great pedigree of open firmware support.

Both are fast - they can route as fast as their GigE ports allow.

Netgear's list is part of their MyOpenRouter site - http://www.myopenrouter.com/

If you ask me, the Netgear WNR3500Lv2 is the "true" successor to the WRT54GL:
Pros:
- Cheap! -- around $40
- Is supported by Shibby's Tomato port -- no problems with uptime; frequent updates in the face of Heartbleed, etc.
- 4 Gigabit Ports in addition to the WAN port
- N support
- USB support for a NAS, but I've never used that functionality

Cons:
- Only 300 mBit N support
- Only 2.4 GHz
- Internal antenna only
- Flimsy base, heh. Mine broke, but the router still stands up.

Netgear seemed to be pretty open to the idea of supporting open source firmwares through their My Open Router website and forums. ...But Netgear was also caught with a backdoor in their firmware, like a lot of other vendors, but I would hope that replacing the stock firmware with Tomato would help with that. (Although since I'm using someone else's build instead of doing it myself who knows!)

I've really loved this router, though.

I wish it were newer (AC support I guess?), had a 5 GHz radio and/or supported faster N speeds... but 300 Mbit is enough for anything I'm doing.

Your proxy may well be plugged into your computer right now:

http://www.myopenrouter.com/

I run Toastman's modified Tomato firmware on mine. Startup script checks the internet for a list of adservers, then blocks them. Every 96 hours after bootup, the script runs again.

I see precious few advertisements.

This question should have been asked at http://www.myopenrouter.com/forums/

I recently bought a WNR3500, flashed it to DD-WRT, then flashed it again to Tomato. Enabled QOS, and haven't made a single change to Toastman's default QOS settings. His settings were developed for precisely the environment into which the author intends to deploy his router.

Netgear's open source routers are awesome!

I'm running DD-WRT on a Netgear WGR614L. I've run both Tomato and DD-WRT on it. Be aware that not all WGR614 models can run Tomato or DD-WRT. Always check the supported router listings!

See http://www.myopenrouter.com/ for a listing of supported routers.

The WNR3500L is also supported in a beta version of Tomato - I haven't tried it, so YMMV, but here's a link:
http://www.myopenrouter.com/article/14430/How-To-Install-Tomato-Firmware-on-NETGEAR-WNR3500L/

Bingo! That's why saying something like, "Their marketing is just not freetard centric like anything GNU or the FSF puts their name on" is absolutely moronic.

No, it's not. It's exactly my point. You are so goddamn dense. Red Hat is NOT MARKETING TO OPEN SOURCE ENTHUSIASTS. How much more clear can I make this? They are marketing their solution as a commercially supported professional enterprise platform. They mention Linux, but not GNU or the FSF. If you want to see freetard-centric marketing, look at this:

http://www.gnewsense.org/

Do you see a difference? Oh, all it seems to talk about is how "free" the software makes you. Try to find this on Red Hat's website.

Wait, here's another one:

http://www.myopenrouter.com/

What's this? Oh, it seems to be marketed as an OPEN SOURCE router My OPEN router. Now find an entity that markets to this segment and profits. Good luck!

Netgear "open-source router" is no different from any of their routers, even less friendly towards open-source than some of their previous models.

Or almost, Netgear provides instructions for compiling our own apps : http://www.myopenrouter.com/article/13860/WNR3500L-Open-Source-Guide-Resources/
That's more open, but not much to do with open-source.

Also from the same page: "WNR3500L is running Linux 2.4.20."

Anyway, that brings Netgear closer to Nokia claims e.g.
But what a nice selection of open-source friendly parts, dear!

I agree with you on finding them in the stores.

I have two linksys wrt610n routers. 8M flash, 64M ram, two draft-N radios (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz), 5 10/100/1000 ports on a dedicated switch chip. That pretty much matches the specs of this WNR3500L. You can't find them anywhere anymore.

And, although they use broadcom radios (binary blob driver), if you're careful you can even get high uptimes. Note that the WNR3500L uses a BCM4718 too -- too bad, I'd rather not use a binary blob, thanks.

indeed, it appears that even with openwrt you are stuck with kernel 2.4: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=22016

The thing I understand for many of the targets that are Broadcom is that their drivers are impossible to get. You only get the binaries for the driver and they only work in 2.4.

So, if they did not release the source for the Broadcom drivers, you can't easily port it, unless you use b43 which is the reverse-engineered drivers.

and even then the product is somewhat lacking:
from http://www.myopenrouter.com/download/13853/OpenWRT-Firmware-for-NETGEAR-WNR3500L-BETA-09-18-09/

* WPA and WPA2 are not working.
* SAMBA support is not present.
* NAS can be accessed only through command line using utilities such as ftp
* and No GUI support to access NAS is available till now.
The patches and the script in this release are based on

I mean, no WPA? stuck with WEP so basically a totally unsecured network. in 2009.

That was what happened with me too. Being impressed by DD-WRT and successfully hacked a bunch of Linksys before, I bought the previous version of the Netgear "opensource" router although it was more expensive with the intention to put dd-wrt or tomato on it (and to promote companies that actually support opensource). Guess what? The standard dd-wrt didn't work on their router! You have to download their own dd-wrt or tomato firmware "distro". And that's not all. After flashing the thing with their provided tomato distro, it totally bricked the router (and I was not the only one). And there is no way to recover the thing, unless you have a 3.3v serial cable to do the JTAG (and they say that's hacker-friendly?).

Ultimately I returned to Newegg, for a restocking and shipping fee. Nice lesson anyway. Don't. Be. Fooled. By. That. Crap. Period. Buy something like an ASUS or a Linksys. FYI Two days ago I was able to put DD-WRT on my friend's Linksys WRT54GS even v7.2 with full SSH + PPPoE support.

(Taken from Netgear's Site)

Internet Explorer 5.0 or Netscape 7.0 or higher

So to use the open-source router, you must have a closed source (or discontinued) browser. Nice. I know they probably copy/pasted the requirements from all their other routers, but still. They went and made a special website for the it, you'd think they could at least add "Firefox" on their page...

wanna see something funny? try their hardware specs page. yeaaah we can definitely turn that into a great open source router.

Wanna see something funny?
hardware specs page.....

rriiiiiiggghhhhtttt clearly open source. we'll know exactly how to use this.

Actually there is instructions on their website on how to solder a USB cable to the router. This is shown for recovery purposes.

http://www.myopenrouter.com/article/10341/Recover-Your-WGR614L-Using-a-Serial-Console-Windows/

Probably not exactly what you want but, its nice there is already instructions (in case) you brick it.

This page:

WGR614L really a WG614v9?

talks about it.

May 16, 2008 3:36 PM Sean, I am the Product Line Manager for Wireless Products at NETGEAR and I apologize. Please do send me your contact information and I will send you a WGR614L version out immediately. There had been an issue with one of our distributors and a few V9 versions was shipped out by mistake. We have recalled, but I guess you were one of the unfortunate ones to get a V9. Again, I apologize. My email address is **DELETED** Please do send me your address. Regards -Som Pal Choudhury Senior Product Line Manager, Advanced Wireless NETGEAR Inc.

I removed his contact numbers and email address. They're on the page I linked to, and he really doesn't need a slashdot post of his vitals, he's got enough problems right now.

Nice to see Netgear's on the ball.

Apparently Netgear's guy responsible is personally taking care of the problem.

hanzie

Hmmm... " !!!! Opening The Router Housing or Putting In Any Customer
Software on The Router Will Void The Warranty On Your
Router!!!!"

WGR614L Open Source Guide V2

What does it mean by open source anyway? Could I install OpenBSD on this thing? I thought broadcom was one of those difficult manufacturers whose stuff had to be reverse engineered because there are no specs? They came around?