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Ask Slashdot: Life Beyond the WRT54G Series?
First time accepted submitter jarmund (2752233) writes "I first got a WRT54GL in 2007. Now, 7 years later, it's still churning along, despite only having one of its antennae left after an encounter with a toddler. As it is simply not up to date to today's standards (802.11N for example), what is a worthy successor? I enjoyed the freedom to choose the firmware myself (I've run Tomato on it since 2008), in addition to its robustness. A replacement will be considered second-rate unless it catered for the same freedom as its predecessor." Is there a canonical best household router nowadays?
Been looking for another router for almost a year now, and still haven't been convinced of a better one than my WRT54GL
Personally I love my Buffalo routers running DD-WRT. I'm pretty sure you can run Tomato on them too, but I thought it wasn't maintained anymore.
There is a war going on for your mind.
And, like any STI, it's guaranteed you'll never get rid of Comcast, too!
Go TP-Link. wr1043nd ; wr3600 or even bigger ones.
Vajk
I picked up 2 Asus RT-N66U thinking that I could have a high speed Wifi Bridge. Since this house is old it creates a lot of interference. WiFi at the router was 30+ Mbps ... in one of the rooms, down to less then 5 Mbps.
The stock firmware is crap. You can't port-trigger multiple ports, only port forward ONE port.
I highly recommend Shibby's Tomato firmware which is up-to-date to see which routers it supports.
http://tomato.groov.pl/
You should consider the Linksys wrt1900ac, it's a really good router and it's open source friendly. Though I have to warning you that OpenWRT still working on releasing a stable firmware. Thanks,
Every time I've tried to figure out this question for myself, I've run into a maze of "router [foo 600] works but [foo 601] doesn't, unless you have [foo 601 revision 2, 3, or 5] with firmware version X but not firmware Y." If you just tell us a brand name or something, your post is fucking useless!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I use Mikrotiks for just about everything nowadays. I haven't really found any situation that it couldn't do the function I required, even when it was something as complex as L7 regexing on a URL to force specific requests into a different priority queue.
http://routerboard.com/RB951G-...
This. I have installed probably close to 50 tp-link routers running openwrt in various businesses in my town. The 1043 is great, as it has a usb port. Openwrt runs very well on these routers.
I've moved over to a Mikrotik RB2011 series device and I have to say I'm loving it. Has all the features I need, and even though the hardware is 3 years old at this stage, it's still alot faster than the older WRT devices. Interface and command line are a little whacky, and hard to get used to, but once you do, you'll never go back. http://routerboard.com/RB2011U...
1. Pick your favorite firmware 2. Check the lists to see which routers are supported 3. Check forums and reviews on the equipment, with the firmware in question (many perform better with dd-wrt than stock) 4. Make your choice
I have long advocated for separating everything - the cable modem / DSL modem should JUST be an interface to the upstream provider, with no NAT and DEFINITELY with no wireless. See the issues with Xfinity and other providers who are now piggybacking their "free" Wifi on customers' connections - I bet it'll be shown in the near future that the already existing NAT table size issues, which already cause many consumer devices to be problematic, are being exacerbated by trying to maintain state entries for the "free" wireless, too.
So you have a cable / DSL modem which is in bridge mode. Then you have some sort of NAT device. If you like running your own OS, a Raspberry Pi or some other tiny StrongARM device is cheap and can run whatever GNU/Linux or BSD you like. Heck, you can even still use your WRT54GL if the CPU in it isn't limiting the speed of your upstream connection.
Then, you have your wireless device. Again, I strongly recommend something that just does bridging - you have the simplest setup because you're not using the wireless device for NAT or any other "features". With all the stories about consumer devices having poor security and intentional back doors, the less exposure, the better. Personally, I pay extra for Apple because the 802.11ac Airport Extreme does wonders with existing 802.11n clients.
The great thing about this is that you can have as many segments as you want without needing a switch which does VLANs. You can plug two USB-ethernets into a Raspberry Pi, for instance, and keep your wireless and wired networks on completely different segments. Or three, and you can have your old device provide a completely separate guest network.
The best thing about this setup is that if one device fails or is shown to be insecure and the manufacturers won't fix it, you can just replace that one device.
USB and 128 MByte RAM make many interesting things possible.
With OpenWrt there currently is an annoying problem with VLAN tagging, but there is a patch: https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket... making its way into trunk.
I very recently replaced my faithful WRT54G with an ASUS RT-AC68U router. Over several weeks, it has never had an issue. I am running a mix of 802.11ac/g/n clients. Range and performance are fine. I live in an apartment with a very crowded 2.4GHz band and it still blasts through fine. The 5GHz band isn't as crowded and is great for the N and AC clients--wish the Chromecast had support for N on 5GHz. And if you want a slightly-tweaked custom firmware, a hobbyist developer maintains the Merlin firmware that is widely admired and used.
Or is the only router ever produced that actually looks good is the wrt54G line? I have yet to see another that does not look really bad.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Follow the herd: RT-N16 running Tomato or similar firmware. Gigabit, 802.11N, USB, open-source.
One of the most popular routers ever made and the natural successor to the WRT54.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I abandoned the toy routers a while ago, bought a used Firebox X700 on ebay for dirt and installed pfSense. Is it fast enough to route a 10,000Base T internet II connection? nope, but it's fast enough for anything that Comcast can throw at it, plus there is a metric buttload of add-on's plus you get epic street cred with your digital posse'.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you are going to do that, load up pfSense and do it right.
But the price is pretty bonkers
http://store.linksys.com/Links...
Apple's AirPort.
Fixed-function devices are the only way to go - set it and forget it, man.
You don't have to hack them, you don't have to bother them. I've had mine for about 10 years now, to replace my old 1st-gen WRT54g, where I was doing stupid shit like trying to build an HTTP & media server into it, which was a conceptually flawed idea for an wireless-access-point.
You should never make devices more complicated than their physical requirements.
The problem a lot of people have is that they believe a device should do more, instead of less. This is the feature-creep that cause devices to be badly designed and complicated.
Apple has they user-experience model down in their Airport, where they say "Nope. Just use it for an WAP, not as a server." which was the correct decision.
I have an Asus RT-N66W (same as N66U, only white). The latest stock firmware is decent, and if you don't like it you can install a host of others. Asus develops the firmware as GPL, and is friendly to outside developers. I believe DD-WRT runs well on it, but I haven't tried, the stock firmware does what I need.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
For a company headquarters job I did recently we looked at a bunch of options, and went with a dozen WNDR3800 refurbs for about $50 a piece. Running OpenWRT with luci-ssl and wpad (not mini, for WPA2) installed on them.
Great for doing multiple SSID's over VLAN's back to the routers/firewalls for handling. After doing another job with a "big company brand" central controller and "dumb" AP's, I'd go the OpenWRT route again in a heartbeat. You waste a few hours configuring a dozen instead of a few weeks debugging a nasty, buggy, proprietary deployment.
There wasn't a huge budget so instead of buying twelve new ones we went with 16 refurbs. The 4 spares are still on the shelf a year later, knock on RSSI.
This model has a lot of users, projects like CeroWRT have chosen it as a target, and the OpenWRT wiki has it very well documented (port numbers, VLAN setup, etc.) Even a real power switch (next to the integrated gigabit switch) and a USB port. What it doesn't have is external connectors for big antennas, so if you need to do long-haul, either solder them on or look elsewhere.
N-range is not good on any compliant hardware, so for a typical house I just get two of these and give them the same SSID's on different channels and then there's great signal everywhere. The OpenWRT wiki's HOWTO on deploying a Guest SSID works well (I've done those for neighbors) but given the option I prefer to send the traffic back over a VLAN to a pfSense firewall and handle it there instead. That's fine for commercial but makes less sense in a typical residential install.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It's a little on the spendy side, but the Soekris net6501s are fairly small and reliable. They have a proper RS-232 serial port console too. Standard x86 cpus. The 6501 will boot both 64bit and 32bit kernels(even though the Intel Atom E6XX line only officially supports 32bit.
Comcast failed to implement the duck switch. They do support rat, pig and ferret, though.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Runs Openwrt, 802.11N (5Ghz) USB, gigabit.
You can pick it up new for under 60$
If someone were to come up with a ARM-based board with at least the capability of three or four NICs and a WiFi access, and could run a decent distro like Debian, even if it cost a couple of hundred bucks, I'd snap up three right now. I've built Linux-based routers/VPN appliances using Debian, iptables and OpenVPN, and I can't complain, but they still suck a lot of electricity, and quite frankly, are rather large. I have three Asus RT-N12 routers with TomatoOS on them, and they work great but I've never been able to get the onboard ethernet switch to reliably work as two routed network segments, and they are getting a bit long in the tooth WiFi-wise.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Virtual machine running GNS3 with the Cisco IOS 12.x mainline code for a 7206VXR. Then just setup bridging and add the IP for the gns3 node as your default GW. All done with one NIC. Enterprise grade router running on your desktop. With modern multicore CPUs it runs great and has all the features you'd ever need (eg Zone Based Policy Firewall, QoS, ACL, policy routing and it can even function as an SBC running CUBE code).
I've kept my old Buffalo running Tomato. It's fine as a router. I like the loopback functionality. I have everything set up find and don't want to change.
But frankly its WIFI was bad. It apparently couldn't cope with the way that modern devices communicate over wifi. Its wifi would get stuck every few days and require a reboot. It's not fast. Its range isn't good.
I just bought an Apple Airport Extreme. Disclaimer is that I work at Microsoft, and joined the company because I'm a Microsoft fanboy. But I bought the Apple base station solely in wifi mode, and it got extra range, and it doesn't crap out as much, and I'm delighted with it. It took an hour to set up (the setup software didn't work on my MBA so I had to install Airport Utilities onto my Windows notebook). But since then it's been running fine without worry.
It's not quite what you're asking for (and I'm asking for it too) but I have an Asus RT-AC56U running dd-wrt. It is an arm box with a decent amount of RAM, all gig ports and supports 802.11ac. It doesn't quite run Debian, but I have the next best thing: an SSD attached via USB3 with a Debian install that I run services out of via chroot from a boot script - I essentially turned off all of dd-wrt's services other than the wireless access point and then use the dd-wrt's kernel with a Debian userland for everything else. It took some messing around to get it all working, but it just works now and allowed me to shut off a much bigger device.
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
I've unfortunately got one of those monopolies as my ISP (Time Warner), but they don't force their hardware on you. Bought my own Surfboard modem and my own RT-N66U router. Full control, and don't have to pay their stupid monthly leases for equipment.
I didn't read all of the comments, so if someone already mentioned it, sorry. The R-7000 can run Tomato as well as DD-WRT if you prefer. It is an AC router which with the Netgear firmware, you can turn into an AP only. It is a HUGE behemoth, has three HUGE antennas and will take up a pretty good amount of space compared to other offerings. That said, it has awesome coverage and speed. They aren't cheap, around $200 (less if you do a little shopping around). I have had mine for about a month and it hasn't had any issues.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
The original WRT54GL had a cult following, but in perspective was a pretty poor OSS router. The wifi driver was binary and heavily tied to broadcoms kernel tree. It was a start however.
Nowadays we have OpenWRT which IMO is the pinnacle of SOHO router software - up to date kernel, upstream OSS drivers, and a kickass config system, all contained in ~6MB firmware file.
Now to answer the question - you want to stick to Atheros/Qualcomm-Atheros chips and make sure the router is supported by OpenWRT. If you have those 2 things, you absolutely can't go wrong.
My suggestion is most TP-Link stuff (except for the newer Archer C-series, it's just not ready yet), or the Atheros-based Netgear stuff (WNDR3700v2 or 3800 if you can still get them). Stay the f*** away from Linksys and D-Link, Asus seems to be nice but they keep using Broadcom chips which are extremely poor for OSS software.
Seconding Ubiquiti gear. I use these (not your specific models, but I love their nanostations) and they simply don't die. Literally months of uptime without a glitch, and even after a power outage, they pick right back up doing their job without human intervention.
And range? I've used a pair of bridged nanostations, without any external antenna (they come with a built-in 120 degree sector), to cross slightly over a mile (with line of sight) pushing full speed without even breaking a sweat.
For about 50% more than a cheap consumer grade router (and the same price or less than the supposedly "high end" consumer crap), these suckers count as a no-brainer if you want something that just works.
Warning - These do not make a good "my first WAP". Getting them configured correctly (even legally, since they'll readily let you blow the doors off ERP and go outside local frequency restrictions) the first time can take even someone familiar with what all the features mean quite a few trials-and-error, and I'd consider that one of their weakest points. But they do it all, and they do it well... WAP? Router? Bridge? WDS node? Check.
/ No, I don't work for them.
A virtual machine is definitely the way to go. Paying $150 for a hideously under-powered computer, which you then struggle to find a new firmware for (because what came with it is garbage), trying to find one with the features you need that fits in the device's tiny memory, a chore which isn't made easier by the firmware authors because they just upload several dozen versions, all with little two-letter codes to specify which features they have, but with no key to the two-letter codes anywhere to be found so that you can only guess which versions have the features you want and which don't, and which will work in your router and which won't, all so that you can just try one and pray that it doesn't brick your $150 piece of shit, only to find that the firmware doesn't work as advertised and so you need to go find another... Well, it's just stupid. Fuck that bullshit.
I just tossed a second network card in my always-on-anyway PC, then installed pfSense in a VM, bridged both network adapters to the VM, and configured Linux to ignore the one that was connected to the cable modem, as the cable modem answers any DHCP request and so that's the only way to make sure the VM gets the global IP address. Worked wonderfully for the two months before my second network card died. Used only 2% of my CPU and RAM.
I've had people tell me "so how well does that work with 100 mbit internet service?" ...and I mean "tell me" as it wasn't a question. I really don't care. Simple fact is that I'm too poor for $150 routers, and in being so poor, I don't have 100 mbit internet service either. It works perfectly for what I need it to do, and so at least for me, the idea of wasting so much money on a router and so much time finding a firmware seems completely absurd, almost like everyone has forgotten that network switches exist and so you don't need a router to connect multiple computers together.
Indeed, the VM isn't strictly required either. You can technically make the Linux kernel do routing functions as well. The only problem there is that, aside from router firmware authors, no one else involved with Linux believes in ease of configuration. So you'll have to learn how to configure a dozen different tools, and despite what everyone says, plain text configuration files aren't magically easy to modify, you still have to know the syntax which is different with each and every one of them, and then you're still faced with problems like making the DHCPv6 server not hand out leases that are longer than the lease obtained by the DHCPv6 client, in case the routing prefix changes and so the IPv6 addresses on the LAN need to be renumbered. I tried for about two weeks to get all of the kernel's routing parameters, the DHCPv4 client, the DHCPv4 server, the DHCPv6 client, the DHCPv6 server, the router advertisement daemon, and a caching DNS server all working together before giving up. It's just a nightmare, and tossing pfSense in a VM is a far easier solution, even if it does add the unnecessary overhead of a VM.
I'm extremely happy with my TL-WR1043ND running OpenWRT.
Gigabit, Wireless N, USB port.
The USB port is particularly useful, since I use 3G as a backup connection, when my ADSL goes down.
morcego
I have a Linksys E900 I've been running DD-WRT on for a while, and never had a lick of trouble with it until this week, when the WAN port fried thanks to a power surge (caused by some dumbass with a drill...).
That reminds me, one of the best things you can do for a home router is to put it behind a UPS. I put my father's Linksys wrt54g behind an old APC-300, it was up for over a year continuously afterwards, and only required a reboot when I had to move it around for some maintenance. Even a crappy $25 Belkin can be surprisingly stable when it has a nice clean power supply.