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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.
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
If you can settle for G instead of N then you might want to look at the Asus WL-520GU for only $45. Asus is also friendly to dd-wrt and other firmwares. Unlike the Linksys WRT54GL, the 520GU also has a USB port you could plug a hard drive into and do your backups or download torrents or share a printer. Another advantage of getting one with a USB port is that your router's operating system can be any size and isn't limited to the router's 4MByte flash. I've had my 520GU for a few months now and haven't had any problems. I've had uptimes of more than a month, limited only by how long I've been able to go without somebody mistakenly unplugging it.
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.
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.
Wireless N and gigabit Ethernet aren't cheap like b/g with 100Mb Ethernet, also the one you linked is a refurb. The ones where they allow you to load on your own firmware are usually a bit more expensive because the throw in more memory and a few other things.
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
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?