The WRT54GL: A 54Mbps router from 2005 still makes millions for Linksys (2016) | Hacker News Reader

The WRT54GL: A 54Mbps router from 2005 still makes millions for Linksys (2016)

arstechnica.com

39 pointssegasaturn13 comments

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Good old OpenWRT with it’s banners on shell login: https://gist.github.com/JiapengLi/b15313f2c5e97c1fc58b

Fondly remember White Russian on the WRT54GL

Quality went a bit down since White Russian.

Incidentally, does anyone remember the NSLU2, also from Linksys, roughly from the same era?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2

It was a very hacking friendly device. Here's the archived page (the original one is long gone) about hacking it before OpenWRT became a thing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160313233931/http://www.nslu2-...

GL-iNet are pretty good. They are basically OpenWRT with a nicer UI, with fallback to the CLI and LuCi when you want it.

This is a good basic model for trying it out: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt300n-v2/

> It uses the 802.11g Wi-Fi standard, which has been surpassed by 802.11n and 802.11ac.

It was popular with OpenWRT. What's the 802.11ac 5ghz equivalent now?

Nothing has ever come as close to being such a universal default choice, but the TP-Link Archer C7 has been a pretty reliable choice for many years: the hardware's reasonably priced for its capabilities and all revisions are based on similar Qualcomm-Atheros chipsets so you don't have to worry about getting screwed with a bait and switch to some Broadcom crap that doesn't play nice with open source. It's still not bad as a secondary AP.

I don't think there is as much of a standard, with more manufacturers on the market and faster development in new speeds. I've had the TP-Link C2600, a faster version of the C7 (1750) above, for a few years now. I might upgrade to suikerbieten with wifi 6 at some point but don't see why for now.

TP-Link seems to be a consistently good choice as they have a number of models with a more CPU power and memory than the minimum necessary.

Had an army of these things doing bridge wifi all over my house for many years, well past their use buy date. I still have them in a box, too slow to be of much use now. I still have the reputation with tech friends as "The WRT guy". These days I buy GL.iNet routers and run OpenWrt.

Amazing to see it still getting sold now in 2023.

I own two of these and while they now sit in my garage I've probably used them for 15 years. I bought them exactly for the reason laid out in the article - this router has solid hardware and the fact you could out just openwrt/ddwrt on it was amazing.

Well, this article is 7 years old now

(2016)

Those things just wouldn't die! My friends used to make fun of me: "still that old little router, why don't you upgrade?". I still have it in a drawer somewhere.

That screenshot from the web interface gives me flashbacks. Wow.

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