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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

How has someone not made a commercially available open source hardware router and just load it up with DD-WRT or Tomato?

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https://www.turris.com/en/

https://docs.turris.cz/

New version coming out next year with 10 gbs ethernet and wifi 6. Made by an established internet company: https://www.nic.cz/

Satisfied Omnia customer here. It’s a decent router with enough performance to host a small website and Logitech media server in lxc containers as well.

Somewhat satisfied customer here. Omnia is great as a wired router but I offloaded wifi to another device (eero in my case). Mox I was less satisfied with, has some strange bugs that have never been fixed. I probably wouldn’t pre-buy a new Turris device, but if the reviews are good I would go for it again.

Why did you use another device for wifi?

Not the previous poster but the WiFi range on the Omnia is pretty poor so I’d imagine that’s the reason. Works fine in a small apartment like mine but I think you would need something else in a house.

Hey, have been researching about this brand recently. Any experience?

I have the first omnia version (of three). Will buy the next version.

Really pleasant experience. Great all in one home router. It took my one minute to setup up and nowadays I got bird on mine for BGP LB with a home k8s cluster. One of the very few open products that is nice to use.

Linksys does!

They have a series of routers designed to support OpenWRT (which IMO is better then DD-WRT but preferences of course). If it supports OpenWRT then others shouldn't be difficult to load on it either.

https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt_ac_series

I've had a decent experience with OpenWRT on a WRT1200AC

EDIT: I haven't used it for actual wifi (just routing/switching) in a few years so I don't know how good they are nowadays.

EDIT 2: OP asked for open source hardware, not hardware that runs open source firmware - my bad!

Also very happy with openwrt on this device. Really quite a decent gui tui and config. Setting up always on open vpn and wireguard was reasonably painless and works well.

I tried OpenWRT a few years ago on my WRT3200acm and the wireless quality was severely lacking. Has a lot changed since then? Do you think it's worth giving another go?

It hasn't been updated since Jan of 2020 but I also don't see any vulns listed for it.

> It hasn't been updated since Jan of 2020 but I also don't see any vulns listed for it.

Are you referring to the manufacturer's firmware or OpenWRT? The latter's last release was three weeks ago.

I just tried the wrt3200acm with openwrt for about a month and it wasn’t nearly stable enough. The wifi issue is pretty well know and people seem to be working on it but I’d stay away.

I haven't stayed up to date with them to be honest. I've switched to ubiquiti access points with my WRT1200AC as just a switch/router. My plan is to upgrade to a x86 box with openwrt or something similar.

So if you had issues with the WRT3200acm I'd go a different route

IIRC, the WRT3200ACM had other large issues in regards to wifi... (WPA3 was off the cards because the firmware blob just does not support protected management frames, for example.)

I tried OpenWRT on my D-Link router and yeah it was super flaky, dropping the WiFi for around a minute at random times throughout the day.

The web interface was much better than stock firmware though.

But I have recently settled for the tp-link Archer AX50 which is very stable and comes with a great web interface, plenty of advanced features.

Not tried OpenWRT on the latter.

dd-wrt has worked fine for me on this, but I'm a pretty casual user. Couple of video streams and phones, pi-hole, a couple laptops, all of which are idle most of the time.

Linksys does not make Open Source Hardware.

Also, it ships with their proprietary "Smart Wi-Fi", not OpenWRT.

> While the Linksys WRT1200AC provides an outstanding experience via Smart Wi-Fi immediately out of the box, advanced users can further modify the router with open source firmware. Developed for use with OpenWRT, an open source Linux-based... [0]

No one, to my knowledge, makes the appropriate Gigabit Ethernet (ideally Dual Gigabit Ethernet) + Wifi Open-Source Hardware SBC that could be used as a router. There are a lot of SBCs with open-source software and mostly-accurate PDFs of their schematics, but very few (the Olimex OLinuXino project, maybe?) that are actually open hardware.

I do understand that truly open-source hardware is a tough sell, as Jay pointed out in his amazing piece "So you want to build an Embedded Linux system" [1]

> People forget that these EVKs are built at substantially higher volumes than prototype hardware is; I often have to explain to inexperienced project managers why it’s going to cost nearly $4000 [2] to manufacture 5 prototypes of something you can buy for $56 [3] each.

And an EVK is likely built at a lower volume than a consumer SBC. The idea that someone can download your hardware design, modify it, and respin it for their desired open-source router but now with a piezo buzzer added might work for Arduino-scale hardware projects but simply isn't reasonable for something that reaches the performance required of a router.

[0]: https://www.linksys.com/ca/wireless-routers/wrt-wireless-rou...

[1]: https://jaycarlson.net/embedded-linux/#

[2]: https://circuithub.com/projects/jaycarlson/BEAGLEBONE_BLACK/...

[3]: https://www.newark.com/beagleboard/bbone-black-4g/beaglebone...

I apologize I misread OP's question. I incorrectly interpreted it as "hardware that supports opensource firmware such as DD-WRT/Tomato".

In terms of hardware like you mentioned there's few open source SBC's at all. Even fairly open hardware like the raspberry pi have a proprietary firmware blob. I guess it will come down to how strictly you define "open source". If you define it as "we have firmware/schematics for every chip on the board" then we'll likely never have that (I don't think even Linksys has that type of access).

These come pre installed with Openwrt. I haven’t tried any of their products though.

https://www.gl-inet.com/products/

These are my next to investigate if my current Eero network gets replaced. The ability to put Wireguard on the router and not behind it, is the thing I need.

Why would it matter where wireguard is? The gl.inet does have the nifty internet kill switch which forces everything through VPN, which is useful I guess.

It's older now, but for several years I used a Buffalo N300 router which came pre-flashed running DDRWT out of the box:

https://www.buffalotech.com/products/airstation-highpower-n3...

I say "used" because my main router has been updated to an AC1900 solution, but it's still kicking, I'm just running it as an access point. Unfortunately, both it and their updated AC1200 solution:

https://www.buffalotech.com/products/airstation-ac1200-gigab...

are discontinued.

Also, while it's pre-flashed with open-source software, it's not Open Source Hardware.

Buffalo does this as well, and there's a variety of PFSense hardware available.

In PFSense hardware you can even find things with atom processors or laptop tier processors - which are going to be more power-hungry than ARM but also a lot faster, and x86 means everything is bog-standard drivers/etc and Just Works. Although I suppose with the world we live in, perhaps not having your web-facing device have speculative execution would be better.

At that level of cost, many people also go to standalone WAPs (although of course there's no reason you can't use DD-WRT/OpenWrt/Tomato to turn an old router into a WAP as well).

Some hardware I've seen recommended for PFsense before:

Alix PC Engines APU2

Netgate SG-1100

Protectli Vault

Asus' routers essentially run a skinned version of Tomato with some Asus-specific enhancements. The stock firmware is open source and there's a popular enhanced fork of it, asuswrt-merlin, that's a drop in replacement.

https://ryf.fsf.org/categories/routers

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