OpenWrt One router officially launched | Hacker News Reader

OpenWrt One router officially launched

openwrt.org

127 pointsthrow743 comments

Quite a bit of discussion on Sunday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285689

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285689

Anyone know if there’s a a good solution to manage multiple OpenWRT devices on the same network, akin to Ubiquiti Unifi or TP Link Omada? Feel like that would be amazing.

I think the closest thing that exists today is OpenWISP[1] but I haven't had a chance to check it out personally yet.

[1] https://openwisp.org/

GL-iNet's firmware is openWRT based, has added features, a system to manage many routers and a bunch of models with varying form factors and features. https://www.gl-inet.com/ and https://www.gl-inet.com/solutions/goodcloud/

Is it opensource? Many routers are based on openwrt, but are not in any way recognizable as such. (ex. Trendnet).

Judging by their pricing section I highly doubt it.

If you're not afraid of the CLI a standard configuration management solution like Ansible would work well.

Hype about the PoE, that's an absolutely killer feature that should be mandatory in basically every networking/home automation doodad.

I'm kind of surprised how many people are into this. The router is the least painful part of my network right now because it's easy to choose your own advanture on halfway decent x86 hardware for a bit more power budget spend and there are multiple high quality router software options including but not limited to openwrt. The parts that I have closed source pain are primarily the wifi aps (Can somebody make a u7 pro max equivalent for less money but similar aesthetics and make openwisp easy for a home gamer to use please??? or make some sort of a front end to make it easy to drive an ansible backend for configuration/update of each ap and a [insert grafana like product here] frontend for pretty/useful logs?)

Archived at https://archive.is/FwAQQ as the site appears to being slowly hugged to death.

Already out of stock at aliexpress, is there any other place to buy it?

BTW really love the industrial design look. Very retro, although I can see some people being turned off due to it. I am assuming it is metal case.

This link is out of stock, but if you poke around, the same item is listed at higher prices as well. so ... maybe scam?

Nice, although I wish it had 10Gb Ethernet. I wonder if there is a 3D printer design file for the case? One could also print the antenna housings I expect.

10G is probably out of scope for this price point, but having 2.5G WAN with only 1G LAN is a bit weird. I suppose the 1G LAN and the WiFi being used simultaneously could take advantage of a 2.5G uplink, but it's a shame to not make the whole pipe available to wired clients.

It looks neat, but is there a U.S. vendor? Ordering from aliexpress seems pointlessly risky.

How so? Devices like this are manufactured in China. Any "US vendor" is reselling them

The grandparent is getting a bit too much flak here I think. "Vendor" to me means "seller", so a more charitable interpretation is them asking for someone selling them other than AliExpress. Possibly (and reasonably) because enforcing consumer protection rights is easier under your own jurisdiction.

I am saying this as someone that has done a fair bit of shopping on Ali and have had mostly a good (if not great) experience with them. The low point would have been recently when a package never arrived, despite tracking showing that it had arrived. Ali have their famous refund guarantee, so I thought I would invoke it and contacted both Ali and the seller. I was told that I needed proof that the package had not arrived by contacting the shipping firm. One slight problem, I had never been informed of the company responsible for shipping. I asked, got a non-response response and closed case. Contacted support, got a friendly response "I will handle it! Do not worry about it!" and then the same non-response response after it got escalated. After a lot of back and forth, Ali just closed the whole case permanently at which point I reached out to PayPal to invoke my guarantee with them which worked and was settled within 15 or so minutes. So, yes, I can imagine someone potentially preferring a local vendor over Ali as I am currently holding off purchases from them until my blood stops boiling.

> enforcing consumer protection rights

I can imagine how that would be a problem in a few countries, but he was asking about the US. Pretty much everyone here pays with a credit card. If AliExpress doesn't refund you, you can just open the bank app/website and click "dispute" next to the transaction. The bank will immediately reverse the transaction and ask the seller's bank for proof that the seller did what they promised.

> package never arrived, despite tracking showing that it had arrived

That one is tricky. A lot of US companies will also refuse to refund you just like AliExpress. You'd have to go through the bank. Or paypal I guess, tho there are no laws forcing paypal to refund you. The package was likely stolen by a porch pirate.

I am not familiar with the US system enough to comment much on the former. But you are missing the point about my recent experience with Ali (plus, there are no "porch pirates" where I live and services range from solid to rock solid). Packages getting lost is fine, mistakes happen (although I suspect in my case that the seller sent it to the wrong address). Telling me to provide evidence while being unwilling to provide me with the company I should contact for it is not fine and sufficiently "not nice" that I am now turned off by them despite other positive experiences.

Sure. I'll sell it to you for $150/unit for 1-5 units, $125/unit for 6-20 units, $100/unit for 20+ units. Has a few weeks lead time, though.

How is it risky? They're well known.

I hope they'll come out with other color enclosures. Remarkably ugly blue IMO.

Where exactly can one purchase the MT8791 SOC used to make this board?

Nothing like a 3.1 MB PNG showcased as a 400-pixel-wide image :->

openmptcp is not supported, darn

Aliexpress, really? That’s an instant nope.

It’s basically Amazon without the middlemen (who do add value by breaking down minimum order qty’s and shortening shipping time)

Just because aliexpress is full of bad products doesn't make a good product bought on aliexpress bad.

They're basically partnering with an existing hardware manufacturer (Banana Pi), and using their existing storefront for the other products. That happens to be AliExpress because the kind of people purchasing the existing products don't mind it.

Makes way more sense then OpenWRT spinning up a new team just to manage the storefront for the single product that isn't core to what they're doing. This way they don't even need to manage inventory.

it's no worse than 2024 amazon

It more or less is Amazon. The only difference is where the warehouse is located.

amazon is also considerably more expensive

Please explain why.

[Edit: Never mind; I misread the docs]

The easiest way to update the firmware is via USB? What year is this?

USB is ubiquitous, proven, and reliable but you are welcome to use RS485.

You probably mean rs232 anyway, I see no reason for an rs485 network here.

In the days since RS485, OTA firmware flashing's become the standard, though we could also go back to EEPROMs with the little UV window. Those were the days.

I’m honestly laughing out loud that I have to explain why I don’t want OTA updates on my network hardware.

I can think of reasonable reasons to not want OTA (it makes some ways of persisting a compromise hard). Now, do you understand why some people very much do want OTA updates, especially on network hardware? (I'll give you mine for free: I want to minimize time and effort required to patch security bugs.)

Are we mixing terminology? OTA means over the air as in wifi. If I need a firmware update I’ll do it from the management console on a wired network, preferably on a dedicated interface or vlan.

Okay, then yes we're using the same term to mean different things. I mostly see "OTA" used to describe Android devices downloading updated system images via whatever network they happen to be on at the moment, but I view it as meaning any update installed over the network, ex. iOS updating over LTE, a laptop running apt-get over wifi, or a server pulling .rpm files over fiber from the cache server 3 racks over. And yes, I suppose that last one doesn't literally have "air" in play, but I don't really see a conceptual difference; you can run SSH over wireguard over wifi and LTE and I think that can be at least as secure as plugging a serial cable into the box directly. Obviously the details depend on your threat model, but I really don't think it's likely to matter that much.

For a lot of things running openwrt in particular, I'd actually prefer that updating not involve me plugging in a direct line - because ideally the device would auto-update and reboot on a schedule with zero human interaction required, so you get security patches without manual effort. (And a robust A/B + self-test setup or whatever to make that safe.)

I don’t want my management network exposed to wifi or the internet. OTA as you have described it requires both.

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