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Comment by mmanfrin | Hacker News Reader

Is it still the default suggestion that Open WRT/LEDE are better than stock router software? What about compared to pfsense (or is that not good for wireless)? Every time in the past that I looked at the WTF website (and I'll admit I did not know about LEDE) it looked so dated that I assumed proprietary firmwares on routers were more capable to making use of whatever the new router tech of today is.

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For my money, these days, there are two devices/ecosystems that stand head and shoulders above the rest: if you're an open source die-hard/have spare time, the PCEngines APU2 is an excellent AMD+coreboot based router platform that you build yourself. If you're not strict about requiring open source, the Ubiquiti line is amazing. The Ubiquiti Unifi Security Gateway line in particular, for home or small business, is incredible.

For home, I've got an APU2c4 (http://pcengines.ch/apu2b4.htm), running LEDE. It pushes something near a gigabit pretty easily (and has a the bufferbloat patches!), and I've got the time needed to administer it when necessary.

For my folks, I grabbed an Ubiquiti Unifi Security Gateway (https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/usg/) and a separate Ubiquiti AP AC Lite. I fired up a controller in the cloud, and now I can manage it remotely if there's ever a problem. It's pretty awesome :).

I've been wanting to move away from standard consumer networking hardware for ages, because it all seems terrible in lots of different ways.

The Unifi Security Gateway looked interesting until I googled a bit, no IPv6 support in 2018 at £100? That's insane. I mean, apparently you can do it manually, but bleh.

From what I can see it does support IPv6 -- https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005868927-UniFi-H... is their own help article on the topic; it doesn't look difficult. It may even come standard in newer firmware. The one caveat I have with UBNT gear is that the stuff you get out of the box always seems to be outdated; I fought a friends ER-X for a few hours until I realised it was running old firmware that lacked some stuff I needed. That said, that might just be a quirk of living in New Zealand...

Yeah, I saw you can do it manually, but what's the point of paying for custom hardware with nice interfaces when you have to switch to a config file for really basic functionality? At that point, might as well stick with bodged consumer stuff.

You'll also have to manually configure UPnP if you want to say, connect more than one Xbox One to Xbox Live at a time (learned that the hard way trying to host a LAN party - thank you broken/crippled EdgeRouter PoE UPnP implementation ruining my event).

Besides the router issue, I've become very apprehensive at installing the latest UniFi AP firmware releases because I've experienced one revision absolutely tank WiFi performance (which took me a while to figure out the culprit thanks to the controller auto upgrading firmware) and another make APs periodically crash/bounce like every 20 mins.

So yeah in my experience after using Ubiquiti products for a few years, they are way overhyped. I guess people are willing to overlook a lot if you have a nice sleek industrial design.

The APU2c4 has only 3 gigabit ethernet channels; do you mainly use it with wireless? Which wireless card?

I also see you're in NZ. Did you get it from Nicegear?

Yeah, the 3 ports is a limitation :(. One's wired up to the ONT (fibre terminal), one's wired up to another switch, and one's wired up to separate wifi endpoint (an old Mikrotik I had sitting around). I'd like to use a miniPCIe wireless card internally, but figured I can wait on that for a while.

And yeah, I grabbed it from nicegear; they're good people :). They also sell AU/NZ power adapters that fit.

Or you can get mini PC (Zotac or similar from AliExpress) and put any number of Linux distros on it for firewalling and optionally other stuff.

I think the difference between OpenWRT and pfSense is that pfSense only runs on PC class hardware, while the kind of device that usually runs OpenWRT is far less powerful.

I used to run OpenWrt on my router ... years ago, and I remember that router had 16 MiB RAM, and a 125 MHz MIPS CPU. If you set up such a machine, say, as an OpenVPN server, this would seriously limit the amount of data I could push through the VPN connection. (Not really, because my Internet connection is not very fast, but that is beside the point.)

Even a Raspberry Pi is far more powerful than the typical OpenWrt router (at least the ones I have handled).

At work, we set up a wifi network using OpenWrt routers, using separate wifi networks as well as different VLANs for employees and guests. To get a vendor-supported solution that can do this, you have to have spend a lot of money.[1]

So in my experience, OpenWrt is a lot better than what most commodity routers/wifi-access points offer. With the exception, maybe, of the Fritz!Box family.

[1] Okay, it depends on your definition of "a lot". In our case, the requirement was to make it as cheap as possible, because strictly speaking we had no budget at all for the wifi.

>I remember that router had 16 MiB RAM, and a 125 MHz MIPS CPU

That was the case back then, but newer routers have to be a lot beefier just to handle the throughput of faster net connections.

I've got a WRT1900ACS running OpenWRT/LEDE at home. 1.6GHz dual core and 512MB of RAM, and it's not really even top of the line by today's standards.

That is good to know!

But my point was that you can run OpenWrt on very small devices[1], but not pfSense. It is true, of course, that today's bandwidth requires more powerful devices.

[1] A friend of mine works in embedded systems, and to him 16 MiB of RAM would be ginormous.

Just tonight, my Wemo [1] light switch wanted to update its firmware and I noticed the firmware had openwrt in its name

[1] http://www.wemo.com/

And strangely enough, my Wemos are also having trouble today, and Belkin (wemo) is blaming the issue[2] on security patches regarding the Intel meltdown bug. Everything is interconnected these days...

[2] http://community.wemo.com/t5/News-and-Announcements/Intermit...

Depends on what you want.

If you want more features than you could possibly want or use, LEDE/OpenWrt.

With some routers (Broadcom and Qualcomm mainly), stock firmware tends to perform better since no cooperation with the kernel or LEDE/OpenWrt.

For security reasons, you'll want to use LEDE/OpenWrt. KRACK fixes got pushed pretty fast (same day) for example.

I've always used custom firmware (openwrt on Asus 500gP/Linksys WRT54g, Tomato and then LEDE on Netgear WNR3500L) and I've been happier with them than stock stuff. For a long time the stock firmware (still true for the cheaper stuff) was really crappy in features compared to custom firmware missing basic stuff. These days the more premium stuff seems to have somewhat feature parity (I care about USB, IPv6, OpenVPN) so that's better especially since some of them seem to be forked from the open source projects (ex. AsusWRT).

One of the benefits of the stock firmware is taking advantage of hardware accelerated NAT and Wifi encryption (WPA) but when I installed LEDE a few months ago on the old Netgear WNR3500L it did give me the option to install a Wifi server that does use hardware acceleration so I can still get that nice high performance.

Note that all of those routers listed above are generally well supported by custom firmware because that's how I made my buying decision. My current main router (Asus AC66U) I left it with stock firmware as it has all the features I want and it's still getting updates often enough.

I've found DD-WRT better than OpenWrt, so I prefer if the option is available. OpenWrt consumes way more resources. I haven't tried LEDE yet.

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