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.

Comments

So what's new?

[Hatta]

What can I do with this that I can't do with a dozen other dd-wrt routers?

Re:So what's new?

[binarylarry]

The OEM appears to be driving this themselves. They didn't have to be sued to enable this and no one had to figure out how to load their own software on it.

Re:So what's new?

[TopSpin]

What can I do with this that I can't do with a dozen other dd-wrt routers?

You can help to convince other OEMs to embrace open platforms, as Netgear has, by buying this product instead of hacking some other box.

Re:So what's new?

[mrcaseyj]

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.

It's N, and has USB

[langelgjm]

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.

it'll work and it's well equipped

[SuperBanana]

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.

Re:Fool me once....

[wasabioss]

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.

Re:Tasty!

[Simon80]

My first question upon seeing this article was actually whether it uses Broadcom hardware. It does. Even the ethernet driver is closed source, let alone the wifi, according to the documentation from Netgear, except that instead of closed source or proprietary, they call it "precompiled". I'm disappointed, and given this, I think I might as well get the hardware from any vendor, because one can't count on the ability to run newer kernels on hardware with so many closed source drivers.

Re:Tasty!

[jeffstar]

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.

Re:$140 seems too much.

[Bught_42]

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 stable, feature rich and *unusable*

[viking80]

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.

Re:"New, but we want to get rid of them"?

[uncqual]

I think in consumer wireless routers "recertified" means one or more of the following:

• "This thing is too hard to set up."
• "I thought I could put it in my basement and get a great signal on the second floor at the other end of the house."
• "What do you mean 'You need a cable or DSL modem'? It's wireless - it says so right there on the box."

Worthless

[paul248]

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?