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Comment by Octabrain | Hacker News Reader

I used openWRT a few months ago on my LinkSys WRT3200ACM, I was pretty motivated with the stuff I could do (VPN, block ads etc). Unfortunately, I had to go back to stock firmware because Wifi performance and issues connecting certain devices (vacuum robot). It was sad to have to give up on it.

Edit: typos.

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It was suggested those type of issues were related to the 3rd wifi radio. It's recommended to disable it: https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt3200acm#wifi_driver_bug_a... . I have the same device, but only use it as router (no wifi enabled) and have a Belkin RT3200 as dumb AP for wifi 6 (as suggested in some other comment).

Me too. On a Netgear r7800 (which is well supported for Openwrt). After much testing, tweaking/changing settings/etc I couldn't get OpenWRT to match the performance of latest stock OEM firmware.

Even wired performance was about 3/4 of stock OEM for my 500MB internet speed. I couldn't use any of the cool anti-bufferbloat QOS options in OpenWRT because that made wired performance even worse (despite getting A+ on bufferbloat tests, the bandwidth loss wasn't worth it). WiFI 5G was spotty and less distance in my house plus would randomly just stop for 30 seconds every few hours.

I really wanted an open source firmware running on my consumer grade router and truly appreciate all the developers hard work that goes into OpenWRT - but nothing has changed unfortunately from my similar experience a few years ago with a supported Asus Router I had and tried OpenWRT on.

The consumer-grade router market is a mess and the choices are only between cheap mass market brand names and crappy firmware that is lucky to even be upgraded at all after a year or two. It must be a very unprofitable market because despite many millions of units sold each year and attempts like Ubiquity, etc none have taken off and/or put out anything better than other cheap unreliable stuff as the other brand names.

I would LOVE a ROBUST reliable and supported consumer grade router/wifi brand that isn't calling their higher-end products "gaming". Like what we had when Cisco owned Linksys and we got their WRT line, or Netgear had a "pro" line that was metal cased. They supported their firmware for years and shared open-hardware specs to we could have better 3rd party firmware's as well. I still have a metal-cased Netgear GB switch in use at a client for probably 10 years now!

OT: since we're speaking about the wrt3200acm, i have a question:

it seems that the four ethernet ports are connected to a single-chip ethernet switch, and appear as a single interface (called "lan" in my openwrt installation).

Is it possible, somehow, to "unbundle" them and make them appear as four different ethernet interfaces (like eth0...eth3) ?

I'm asking this because i have a vlan-capable switch and would like to have a separate network connection in each vlan, with the each network interface in its own zone.

You didn't specify if you are using openwrt and which version. I used wrt1900 and wrt3200 as router with one of the latest openwrt (not the one posted) and do precisely that, have each switch physical lan port on a separate interface and network range. It has been possible for quite a while, but the latest DSA changes to the linux kernel make the process much simpler.

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/dsa/dsa-mini-tut...

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/dsa/dsa.ht...

Your router is already a VLAN-capable switch—that's how it separates the WAN and LAN ports. It's a 7-port switch: by default it's configured as four LAN ports, one WAN port, and two ports are wired up to the SoC (https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt3200acm#switch_ports_for_...). Using OpenWRT you can reconfigure the VLANs to suit your needs.

I have that router and it's working well for me.

A friend of mine got it and wasn't working well for him.

We both used OpenWRT on that.

It seems that the version he was using (more recent than mine) doesn't work well on that hardware.

Which is as unfortunate as ironic since the WRT3200ACM is the spiritual successor to the WRT54g that spawned the whole OpenWRT/dd-wrt thing.

Regarding mine... I plan on switching to some kind of x86 and run pfSense. I'll probably keep it around and use it as a wireless access point only.

I quite like this build [1] for the WRT3200ACM. I run non-critical devices on the 2.4 network and only personal devices are on the 5. I used to have some intermittent Wi-Fi issues but haven’t had any since switching to the divested build.

[1] https://divested.dev/unofficial-openwrt-builds/mvebu-linksys...

If you have an old router, or are willing to pay the (sometimes literally) $5 for an ancient model, you can often put those old ones in AP repeater mode just for finicky hardware like those vacuum robots, leaving your 3200ACM to do fun stuff for modern clients. I think it would even make your 3200ACM faster for all its clients since it wouldn't have to process the wireless traffic for the older bands

Could it be related to WPA3 security? With OpenWrt you get a lot of "new" features like WPA3 etc. and sometimes older Wifi devices are not compatible. Then you need to change the settings (maybe downgrade to WPA2 on the 2.4Ghz Wifi).

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