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Netgear WNR3500L Open Source Router Announced
MyOpenRouter writes "Netgear has announced the WNR3500L, a brand new, open source, wireless-N gigabit router customizable with third party firmwares. MyOpenRouter is the dedicated source for Netgear open source routers, with the full scoop including a review with screenshots, how-to's, tutorials, firmware downloads, etc. Here's a review and the downloads page." The router can run popular open source firmware including DD-WRT, OpenWRT. and Tomato. It will list for $140.
What can I do with this that I can't do with a dozen other dd-wrt routers?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I feel this is a great move on Netgear's part.
....shame on you. But you're not going to fool me again, certainly to for $140. I have a Netgear "open source" 802.11g router sitting in a closet somewhere. It never worked worth a damn. Netgear replaced it with another similarly-named model (with a completely different design). OpenWRT doesn't support the old one fully, and DD-WRT has some things I don't particularly like (and I'm not sure support is there, either).
I'd just assume get an Airport if I was going to use a commercial router. Am currently using an old notebook running Debian, which does everything I need with a lot less pain.
802.11n?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Apart from it being an N router (not sure what Linksys has in the way of N offerings, I'm still using a trusty WRT54G), this thing also has a USB port that you can hook up a USB drive to and use it like a NAS, which is kind of cool.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
with the popularity of DD-WRT and others, i'm surprised it took wifi companies this long to try to make money on it. linksys made the WRT-54GL a long time ago but didn't try to promote custom firmwares.
My WRT54G is $100 less than runs custom DD-WRT just fine. If I had gigabit network cards and wireless N i might upgrade, but for a home network not doing much filesharing locally I don't see the point. I think they're just trying to capitalize on the face the code is open-source. And forcing people to pay a premium for it. The WRT310N is $70 new, has practically the same specs, and can be flashed. So what's the benefit?
$140 is damn expensive for a $30 hunk of plastic easily gotten from the local S-Mart. It'll sell like submarine screen doors!
I paid $40 for my WRT54G, and since I (or *anyone* I know) don't have any equipment that speaks 802.11n, I'm not going to lay down $140 for a new router when my current one finally dies. I'll go out and get another of the exact same.
This product is pretty much doomed to fail, which seriously sucks because this is something us GNU folks have been clamoring for since wifi was wifi.
If you're going to drop that much on a router, you're better off getting your own board and a custom radio. More configureable, better hardware. I'm using Ubiquity's routerstation right now with openwrt on it. Really a nice setup for essentially the same price. If you don't want to spend that much though, just get a WRT54GL and drop openwrt/ddwrt/tomato on it. You'll get essentially the same performance minus the wireless N support.
It's great if "open source" is seen by a company like Netgear as a positive marketing tool. However, it's a bit of a stretch to list DD-WRT, OpenWRT. and Tomato as all being open-source. Tomato has a nonproprietary back end plus a proprietary web interface. DD-WRT has a history of GPL violations, and tries to charge people more money for a version with more functionality. If you take "open source" totally literally, then yeah, maybe these are open source, in the sense that you probably are allowed to read the source code freely. But I don't think that's what most people in the open-source world really mean by open source. OpenWRT is the only one on this list that is really totally free and nonproprietary. I run OpenWRT on my router, with a web-based front-end called Gargoyle, which is also (really) open source. Gargoyle is pretty bare bones, but it is good enough for a lot of quick, simple stuff. It would be nice if the developer could include just a tad more functionality in it, though, because I do end up having to ssh in and do certain things from the command line.
What I would really like is a cheap router that wouldn't crash and hang up all the time. For my home network, I picked up a wrt54g v.4 on ebay, because it has more memory than the current models, and is reputed to be more stable. I also bought a (cheap) UPS, because a lot of people say it's power surges that tend to cause routers to lock up. Well, I still have to reboot the router fairly frequently. It doesn't seem to be correlated with what firmware and software I run, either. I don't understand why I should have to reboot such a simple, single-purpose device more than once a year. The netgear box referred to in TFA is $130. I might consider paying that much for a router for my home network if I had some reason to believe it would need less frequent rebooting. The problem is that I have never seen reliable data that measured frequency of lockups in routers and correlated it with specific variables that I have control over. I'm perfectly willing to believe that a $1000 router designed for medium-sized businesses would not lock up. I just don't want to pay $1000.
Find free books.
I've had an open source wireless-N router for a while now. I installed dd-wrt on it first day. Linksys makes WRT310N.
It's much cheaper than that on amazon.
Yum USB, 64-megs RAM, 8 megs flash. Now if only their WiFi driver is OPEN SOURCE and working reliably in all modes. This is my complaint with most Broadcom and Atheros-based products right now, the WiFi driver blobs are a PITA.
What's innovative here is they seem to be letting partners develop software packages to run on it... an iPhone-style "App store" for home router software addons, anyone (?)
Does this mean the warranty isn't void if you flash it with custom firmware?
Are they providing cool things like serial ports for debugging, and an external JTAG header, so you can easily fix it if your custom patched firmware breaks or something (?)
How about a fully vlan-able switch, POE capabilities, and enough RAM to run some minor computing loads ? :)
http://www.ruckuswireless.com/products/mediaflex-home-products
What can I do with this that I can't do with a dozen other dd-wrt routers?
For starters, find it in a store. When my old 802.11g AP died, I had a hell of a time trying to do a JOIN between "StoreShelf" and "open source firmware compatibility list." I wanted to just go to the store, not order online. 95% of the stuff on the lists for DD-WRT, Tomato-whatever, and OpenWRT hasn't been sold in at least a year, or can only be found in one or two countries.
Second, it's well equipped: you get N radios, a decent amount of RAM (64MB is top of the market, many devices have 8-16) and a full set of gigabit ports; I didn't notice whether or not they're handled by the CPU or an actual switch chip (the latter is better, if I remember correctly.) The list of 802.11n routers supported by the open source firmwares is pretty small. It becomes scarce when you limit yourself to gigabit ports and more than 16MB of ram. The only shame I see with this is that there's only 8MB of flash; that's stingy, but not the end of the world, as they include USB and DD-WRT and company are capable of using external storage for the OS. USB flashkeys, and 30MB/sec ones at that, are pretty damn cheap these days.
Then: have it work, without spending an hour reading through scattered documentation, wikis, FAQs, and forum pages trying to figure out if you'll brick the device you just spent $50-100 on.
Then: have it continue to work, without crappy performance, randomly rebooting itself, freezing, or slowly grinding to a halt over the course of a day or so. All of which I have had repeated problems with. On my N router, I could only get about 8MB/sec with DDWRT; on the stock firmware, I got 12.
I love DD-WRT, it's amazingly, amazingly configurable- but finding supported N hardware that works reliably is a royal pita. I'm pleased to see that someone is going to release hardware that plays nice with the open source community and has a better chance of working properly. It's an extra bonus that it is pretty decently spec'd out.
Please help metamoderate.
Since we are with 8 people on one connection I decided I needed some extra functionality so I bought a WRT54G. My roommates got wireless and I got iptables :p No upd floods on my network !
These router makers have been constantly resisting people "hacking" into their routers to make them do much more than they did "off the shelf." Why? Why do they care? Why did they ever care? Is it because they think their Linux based router OS is in need of protection? Are they believing that the software is really the "product" that people are interested in? I never really understood it. The people who do the modifications just wanted the router for the conveniently arranged hardware.
Linksys put out their "L" series routers already, but they are slightly more expensive and in limited supply everywhere I have looked.
This approach from Netgear seems to appeal exactly where these users live -- getting a device they can work with, collaborate on and grow. And by doing this, they are actually building a a fan-base rather than restricting their user-base.
...in the end, it's still a Netgear.
It's a nice thought, but have you every actually used the Netgear open routers? They are terrible. DD-WRT and Tomato are both quite buggy on them, and the documentation is pretty poor. I suggest going with Buffalo.
Though the wrt54gl is a nice little unit and there are alternatives that are compatible and have a usb port like the asus wl-520g, this router has a few pluses.
This has:
a very nice 480Mhz CPU.
USB 2.0 while other devices have USB 1.1
Wireless N and Gigabit (which is available in other routers)
8MB Flash/64MB Ram
What this really means is that you can actually get gigabit across the switch ports and you can really get N speeds out of the unit. You can also turn on QoS without overworking your router, actually setup a VPN connection that doesnt drop or freeze the router, and actually put a hard disk on the USB2 port and get a reasonable transfer speed. This will be in the top class of wireless routers in performance.
I have a 15MB/1MB pipe at home and a regular wrt54g cannot handle my use on the wired ports and bogs down and freezes up when pushing the thing. I put in a cisco 881 and use the wrt54gl just for wireless access, all routing is done on the cisco.
I have over 30 wrt54gl units in production and to keep them running without a lot of reboots I limit this uplink port on my switch to 10Mb. Great unit but not for a power user or office IMHO.
A unit like this may be just what a lot of people need where a $60 router isnt powerful enough and to get serious they needed to jump up to a unit that was a couple hundred bucks.
"If you can settle for G instead of N then you might want to look at the Asus WL-520GU for only $45."
Why are so many routers now 2 1/2 times the previous prices?
I bought 4 of the Netgear WGR614NAR 802.11b/g for $15 each, delivered. They seem fine.
I meant to say, $140? Why are so many routers now 2 1/2 times the previous prices?
This looks like a great device to replace my old WRV54G router (which has hardware IPSec support). When I bought the WRV54G, there were a couple projects to create an linux firmware, but none ever panned out.
Do any of the OSS firmware options support IPSec? I know it won't be fast on an embedded processor like are in these routers. But, it should be okay for a home router.
which i just noticed is not what you're talking about. duh.
I would get this thing if it were certified with the final 802.11n standard.
There just isn't any point to get a draft n 2.0 product months before the final is released.
Also this thing is capable of 300mbits at 2.4ghz, while most of the new Intel cards are capable of 450mbits at 2.4ghz and 5.8ghz.
I applaud Netgear on the whole OSS thing, but the timing just isn't right.
It's interesting to say the least that it seems that every single person here is bitching about any home network gear that has been stamped open source in the past but the same people are interested in buying this unit at a premium price because it has the open source stamp on it.
Did I just miss something?
A full blown mini mainboard with serial, parallel, video, audio and usb ports, much more RAM and processing power, compact flash, mini-pci and pci slots, etc. plus a powerful wifi mini-pci card. It's not N, for now, but who cares? The day you need N it will just be a matter of shelling out 20-40$ to get a new mini-pci card that supports it.
Call me when these open routers' prices drop to $25. Today everything above $50 is a complete ripoff.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated in any way with that shop. I just have been a very happy customer in the past when my company needed some embedded boards and after a good search on the net we ended up purchasing some of their their old WRAP systems to develop wireless stuff and firewalls.
I have a WNDR3300 running dd-wrt and an Asus WL-520GU as a print server. I am not impressed with the range of the 5GHz WNDR3300 in N mode. In a room where I receive decent G coverage, I get almost no N coverage. My old router used to reach up to the third floor, but the Netgear fails to do so (hence the Asus as a print server and G repeater).
DD-WRT, however, is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. I remember manually editing IPTABLES back in the day to make my computer be a router, and I never thought I'd see it on something so embedded and cheap.
If it supports both, I'm in!
I have not tested the netgear WNR3500L personally, but one of the differences is often it's WAN->LAN thoroughput capability. With faster connections appearing to the broad public, network hw companies increase the speed of their cheap-o consumer equipment. Don't be fooled by the WAN port being 100mbit or even 1gbit; that's not what matters.
I connect through my 100/100 connection to friends with similar connection speeds, and we've found that often the router is a serious sink in the transfer speed. Upgrading hw have had direct, measureable effects every time. And it's not just because configs got cleared out.
OpenWRT is a great project, but unfortunately unusable in its current state.
I have tried to use it on the Linksys WRT54GL, which is the default box, (hence 'WRT' in the name)
It is stable, feature rich, and *unusable*. I have for example not been able to configure the box as a client. It will work just fine as an AP
Looking for a solution, I installed an older version of OpenWRT, and this would only work as a client, not as an AP.
Expect the default setup to not rout packets at all. You have to configure the router carefully before it will work at all.
I have set up wireless networks with many configurations using other boxes and software, and never had this kind of trouble. It can certainly not be used by an average user.
It appears all resources are beeing spend to making it run on your casio wrist watch and other exotic targets while the old focus is lost. Seems like the 99%vs1% rule backwards:
Target 99% of development resources to resolve issues faces by 1% of the users.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
please read and obey the new guidelines, Slashdot, Inc!: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm
Subject says it all.
If you're doing VPN or tunneling, you need the RAM and CPU performance a device like this offers. I've crushed Linksys routers with low VPN loading and tunneling use. Something like this would possibly be useful for caching or lite server duty with an external drive.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
Good point.
Thanks. Good point.
I often wonder if "re-certified" sometimes means "new, but we want to get rid of them".
Grammar check, people! "Firmware" is a collective noun, like "clothing." You have one piece of clothing, two pieces of clothing. In this case, it is used in the collective sense, so it should be: customizable with third party firmware.
So did the last 'open source' router I bought from Netgear - then I found out it could ONLY be configured with IE6. I think I'll hold off on buying any more 'open source' netgear equipment until I can confirm they aren't still confused about this 'open source' stuff.
Your WRT54G is 100 Mb Ethernet and it is costing you a lot more than $30 or even $140 to sit there waiting for stuff to copy between your machines.
Even gigabit ethernet is slowing down my internal network. Any one of the computers in my house can saturate it. I can't even imagine going back to 100 Mb.
I suppose you posted anonymously because you don't want to be held to account for your predictions.
Your routerstation is 100 Mb Ethernet. This box is gigabit.
You are comparing a Yugo with a Ferrari, network performance-wise.
There is no alternative to having a hot spare.
If you work from home it is pretty much required. Maybe even two hot spares. I do.
Figure out what a even morning of downtime will cost you and it is really quite cheap.
If you have two hot spares then you have some breathing space to experiment with firmware upgrades.
I've been working on one for some wifi enabled control functions - I have a couple USB serial dongles hanging off it, one with an I2c bridge for general IO & control. (Using openWRT)
But - the USB serial cables drop out after a while on 2.4 kernel, and 2.6 doesn't support the onboard wifi (because broadcom doesn't release info on it, from what I understand) - but the serial cables seem solid in 2.6.
Pretty sweet as it stands, but it would be great if the wifi was working under 2.6 - or maybe it is now?
There are a few other things lacking in 2.4, but I can't think of them at the moment.
Sent from my PDP-11
Here is my set up. Don't need no stinking routers: http://www.shorewall.net/XenMyWay-Routed.html Shorewall is really easy to set up. I am ashamed that I put it off for so many years.
If I could get my Netgear 802.11n PCI card to work on an Open Source operating system. From what I hear it's tough to find any -n adapters to work in Linux. Might as well just stick with all -g gear and save money.
I wonder what voltage the psu uses. I find these devices are annoying in that they usually come with 110V only PSUs. Irritating if you move to a different country...not a deal breaker, but still.
Max.
This device uses a Broadcom chipset, and needs a Linux 2.4 kernel with a binary blob to work properly.
Linux 2.6 was released in 2003. That's *six years* ago. What kind of bizarro-world are we living in where modern hardware still requires 2.4?
The description seems to imply that you can run Linux printers off the USB port and load drivers on to it. Anyone know for sure?
Living in Chile
It's my old PC. It also is my firewall, IDS, trojan horse honeypot*, VPN, file and p2p server, printer and Samba server, development stage and database machine. (Don't worry, I am aware of the risks of putting that all on the same machine, and have nicely separated them in SElinux-protected VMs, etc. It's just a bit slow. ^^)
___
* Infecting your system while you're thinking you're infecting mine.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Your system appears to burn at least. 50 watts of electricity, so 2 years of always on equals $87, so now you are up over $400 in cost. If you have a hot spare (you DO have a hot spare?) then you are talking almost $800.
This system uses approx. 5 watts, $9 of electricity in 2 years, so the total cost is $150. With a hot spare you are still less than $300.
Trendnet TEW-652BRPv1.1 was $40 at Fry's this afternoon. I got a few firmwares to boot on it already, and OpenWRT has some support if you're willing to play wiht dd and a hex editor to make a valid install bundle. I do with Tomato worked on it, because Tomato has a great UI but I have plans for this thing other than routing so OpenWRT is perhaps a better choice for me. Mine only have 4MB flash and 32MB ram though. In all honesty I could live with half the RAM and double the Flash.
While I applaud vendors that embrace an open platform. I must say that $140 is a bit steep. Ubiquiti's products are open and well supported by third parties. And starts at around $60 for a basic 11b/g outdoor model and goes up to about $90 for several models that do 11n.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
there's no port to use a directional antenna...kinda lame if you ask me /writing from a wrt54g in wireless client mode with tomato using a directional antenna...
You know Trendnet is a great name. Their stuff just works.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Say what you will, but I am done with NetGear. I have an N wireless router that routine locks up and has to be reset. I have had 2 different wireless NetGear adapters that have a major design flaw that causes them to overheat and crash. This would happen in less than 30 minutes. What a royal PITA that was. Tons of threads on the internet about these crappy adapters, and NetGear refuses to do anything about it. And yet they are STILL selling the same flawed design. I'm really surprised that somebody didn't start a class action lawsuit against them. Never again will I trust NetGear equipment. Got a Linksys wireless adapter and never had a problem.
What I want to be able to do is download one tarball, plus the required additional tarballs for things like the cross compile toolchain, extract all the tarballs in the same directory, run a specific command, and watch it build everything from source. Oh, and it has to work on any recent Linux system with basic host compiler toolchain ready to use, regardless of CPU architecture.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I've got an 802.11b/g router that's configured to 2mbps on the b side only and my users like it since we have several different routers in the neighborhood that show up. The advantage is that by restricting the thing to the b protocol and limiting it to 2mbps, it actually runs at the full 2mbps at max range unlike all the other routers we see. As to file and Printer Sharing, sure it doesn't run as fast as it could, but that's not a major issue here. The only thing we do is share some pictures/music/videos across the network and as WMP 12 (using W7-RC) caches things, it doesn't affect performance at all. For those who use WMP, change your buffering from the default to 30 seconds. That makes even a slow wifi connection acceptable to you for music/video streaming.
On a side note, I'm not afraid to let my idle systems continue their downloading efforts in the background for a week if needed to grab the files I'm after even when I'm at work (reason I have a UPS on my primary system).
Right now I'm finding this discussion to be damn funny when people bitch about saturating even a Gig-E connection as I know none of you have Gig-E to the home.Sorry folks but you can have your Ferrari while I still get by fine with my old Model-A and yes you have to slow down around me as the damn thing will crap all over your new car. How do you like the gravel my tires throw and don't forget the Oil slick it'll drop in a heart beat.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Yeah, like others I bought one of these based on Slashdot hype the last time around. And got burned.
In a nutshell:
- That router used a proprietary firmware format, and there were no obvious tools or shell scripts posted that would convert, say, current Tomato source to a package that would install on the Netgear.
- There wasn't even a freekin' howto!!!
- Community support is "provided" by the commercial MyOpenRouter site, which doesn't seem to be affiliated with, sponsored by, or in any other way connected to Netgear. It's some kind of back-alley licensing deal.
The result was that I found myself relying on untrusted third parties with no accountability to compile firmware for my router, and the firmware they offered was six months out of date and missing important fixes.
That's not support for Open Source, it's a twisted perversion of it. It smacks of carelessness and greed on Netgear's part, and a foolish attempt to stay relevant while their high-end sales are devoured by Linkysys and their excellent WRT-54GLS.
Before you buy one of these, take a look at the MyOpenRouter site and see if they've provided decent documentation, tools, and up-to-date firmware since last year.
I have it on good authority from a decorated ichthyologist that you say "fish" when you are referring to a bunch of individual fish animals, but when you are specifically referring to multiple species of them (as opposed to the animals themselves), you say "fishes".
A bunch of goldfish: "fish"
All the goldfish and clownfish in your aquarium: "fish"
The species of goldfish and clownfish, collectively: "fishes"
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Dammit, I left off the whole point of my posting:
So perhaps the same applies to firmware. Any postdoc firmwarologists in the house?
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Basically this is similar to many other units with N and USB but it differs in one aspect. CPU speed. The CPU of this "router" runs at 480MHz which is twice than virtually anything else on the market with very few exceptions. Anyone that have used a "router" for more than a router e.g. NAS, PBX, SVN and many other useful things has noticed the shortcoming of the slow BCM470x CPUs. The slowness is especially evident in any encryption based task such as SSH, SFTP, Bittorrent (when ran only over encrypted peers). The slowness is also evident in any network file transfer or USB (local) file transfer. For example I run Debian Lenny on ASUS WL500gP which works great but file transfers over SMB peak at 3.7MB/s only, SFTP peaks at 1.2MB/s. For these reasons WNR3500L will be a bless. This CPU will solve most of those problems and while we will probably not see Gb speeds for file transfers they should reach at least ~100Mb sustained speed. It will also help all encryption tasks.