anyone can suggest a great openwrt compatible router in sub 50$ category?
glinet ship their own builds of a forked openwrt (most based on 19.x) containing proprietary patches and binaries. I got a handful of their most recent devices as of last year and all of those are officially still stuck on an ancient 19.x with several security issues that are fixed in upstream but don't make it down.
Got the GL-MT1300 working with a self-built open-source OpenWrt 21.something pretty straightforward but the E750 has been nothing but trouble, weird bugs and unreliability as soon as I try anything except light tweaks of the out-of-box experience. The last thing on the E750 is that my self-built firmware will initially work fine but at some point (and all subsequent boots after), there is not way to get network access either via wired or wifi, despite the OLED indicating everything's as it should. It's in the drawer waiting for me to figure out how to get serial working to debug it as a full factory reset is the only way to recover otherwise and I replicated the issue a few times already.
This is all after several hours of trying to dig apart their convoluted github org to figure out how the builds are made and where the code comes from in the first place.
I'd be really surprise if there will ever be anything 22.03-compatible for any of their current devices given all the iptables voodo in their custom scripts...
Given the combination of poorly maintained official images, inconsistent compatibility with open source upstream, and no way to reproduce their builds, I'd say these can be fun little toys if your use-case perfectly matches the out-of-box provided features but sadly enough you should seriously consider and test each model individually before relying on it for production use even just personally. At least until public progress is made on some of that.
[1] https://github.com/gl-inet/openwrt#product-branch-relationsh...
This should give an idea of how much much attention they pay to security updates and the response one can expect when opening issues or PRs on their repos:
I completely resolved the issue by flashing the mainline OpenWRT image from openwrt.org. It has been working pretty well ever since.
Imma let you finish, but you've always been able to install vanilla OpenWrt on GL.iNet devices. I've been doing this for years across most models. Actually there are only a couple of recent GL.iNet routers that I don't own.
My rant above comes from multiple days of struggling to get a working build that doesn't have stability issues not present in the official image.
Like I mentioned, I don't recall any surprises with the MT1300 that couldn't be worked around.
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/reboot-loop-problem-at-startup-o...
https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/issues/9273
(neither of these describe the issue i was talking about fwiw)
This post details a community firmware with images: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/gl-inet-ax1800-new-router-openwr...
That community repo is a fork of the GL.iNet build infrastructure repo, just with less definitions that allow compilation to succeed.
My understanding is that infrastructure fetches the official owrt sources and applies the patches listed in the yaml files, but I didn't audit the entire build system in 15 minutes :P
Is there an alternative HW You'd recommend for OpenWRT?
Other than that I'm yet to find anything that beats taking a generic x86 or aarch64 that happens to have a miniPCIe slot , put in appropriate wireless modules and treat it more like you would a normal linux installation. Separating AP/router duties between two separate devices will help a lot to simplify things whichever route you go (makes little sense for the "pocket travel router/ap" scenario obv).
OpenWRT has some great extensions and luci modules, some of which integrate very well. If you don't need them and want to do anything more than a standard home network setup, I'd consider if the trouble with OpenWRT is even worth it and set things up from a base debian/rocky/freebsd/openbsd/whatever base instead. Things that can be super time-consuming to get right in OpenWRT can actually be surprisingly straightforward once you remove their abstractions. Especially with nftables, if you're on Linux.
(Personally I have an ath10k based ZyXEL NBG6817 (product name is "Armor Z2") which I'm happy with. But it was a few years ago I bought it, don't know if it's still on the market. Also still running the previous openwrt 21.02, haven't yet upgraded.)
one caveat at the moment: 802.11ax is? was unstable.
It has decent specs, and OpenWrt on it works well for me.
There's the security issues. If their AWS infra for their cloud services is that shit (as was revealed by a hack by an internal person), i doubt security is taken seriously in the org in general. Not to mention them suing security reporters.
Unlike their sometimes dubious hardware QA, it doesn't impact you that much if you plan on flashing your own firmware on their hardware, but still, those are kind of turnoffs. Hardware quality seems to vary somewhat, but is mostly decent.