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Comment by howdydoo | Hacker News Reader

Nothing in life has a 100% success rate. But I think the fact that most people recommend OpenWrt, shows that most people don't have these crazy problems. Buy well-supported hardware, follow the directions carefully, and you'll be just fine.

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Certainly. But I had a very difficult time. I purchased an ASUS router recommended by the OpenWRT website, followed directions but struggled for hours, and eventually bricked it only to find out later via searching forum posts that some routers with that model number are not supported if they were made in a specific year (of course, this was discovered via trial and error by other frustrated forum members, no one had updated the original recommendations to reflect this, and installing the recommended firmware destroyed the router irreversibly).

Really irreversible, or could it be reflashed via so called 'JTAG-cable', and serial terminal, tftp, or maybe even https://www.flashrom.org/Flashrom (but then with other cables and plugs, because most likely directly writing into the chip without any intermediaries)?

I would personally avoid ASUS as they tend to use Broadcom NICs, which never have good free software support. If one was recommended, maybe it was an exception, but I'd still try to avoid ASUS.

If you want a cheap rec that's easy to get OpenWrt on, get a Netgear R6220 off eBay. I've gotten 3 of them for $20 each or so.

This was exactly what happened to me. Certain tp-link routers made specifically for Italy got bricked if you installed OpenWRT on them.

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