Hacker News Reader

Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

I'll second the recommendation on the TP-Link Archer C7. It's a really nice, not too expensive, piece of kit. Bought one for my folks to replace a cheap old Walmart-grade LinkSys, and it was night and day better - now my dad can pick up usable signal in his garage, 500 yards away from the router.

View on HN

Here are 3 links that might be usefull: http://rooftopbazaar.com/routerfirmware/

https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/423rn6/best_2015_o...

https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/36s530/better_ac_r...

Initially I was also planning to buy the Archer C7 but it seems OpenWRT is not flawless on it. This is unfortunate since that appears to be the recommended router for OpenWRT, so there is nothing on which OpenWRT works perfectly.

That was the situation 10 months ago. I'm not sure if things have changed since then. If they did, the OpenWRT has not been updated: https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wdr7500 According to some recentish posts on their forum there may be hope: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=342710#p342710

I wonder if it isn't better to just go DIY ( http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/09/diy-homebrew-router... ) with pfSense or with the PCEngines apu1d4 and use a separate switch and access point.

Right now, it is very important to have a router with firmware you can trust and upgrade, otherwise sooner or later it will join a botnet. Therefore for me any router option without FLOSS firmware support is eliminated.

Edit: Just read the comment above about OpenWRT being dead. Looking into LEDE.

I am running an Archer C7 v2 on OpenWRT. Works flawlessly. Some notes though:

- 5ghz only worked after manually inserting the latest firmware blob for the qca9880 chip and setup only works via shell for it, setting any options for it from the web interface breaks stuff

- it's fast enough... I'm running a freeradius2 server on it, SMB shares on two 32gb USB pendrives, miniDLNA, DHCP for ~50 physical and virtual clients, a VPN tunnel to a VPS and so on. Never hits full load.

- 2.4ghz range is massive, 5ghz less so obviously...

- it is absolutely stable however, uptime exceeds two months and the only reason for shutting it down back then was a move, almost nine months before that

If you're simply looking for APs I would recommend Unifi UAP-AC-Pros though.

I didn't even have to install any blobs, 5GHz just worked. I think mine is a v2 as well.

If 5ghz works it's a v2 I think. Install is a while in the past, so if it worked out of the box for you all the better :)

I got Linksys WRT1900ACS at home. The router works very well with original firmware but as you expect is very limited in terms of features compared to opernwrt(and others open source alternatives). I was running openwrt for almost 6 months. Even that it said even on the box it works with openwrt the wifi support is complete shit! The wifi driver is performing so bad it will turn your life in to living hell. Expect disconnects and low bandwidth when using wifi (for both 5G and 2.4G). Recently I restored the original firmware and the wifi is performing great but is just a wifi router now. Nothing more. I lost all the additional features that motivated me to buy it. I want to throw it out the window!! Imo stay away from linksys if you want open source firmware and advanced features.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com