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Comment by suprjami | Hacker News Reader

My advice is to just avoid DD-WRT altogether. The community is so hostile and unhelpful, the site and wiki full of conflicting information, and almost all builds for anything besides the old Linksys gear is in a real unstable state. It seems almost inevitable that DD-WRT will just result in bricking your router and having some forum asshole mock you for it.

I'm running Merlin's AsusWrt on an RT-AC66U and I've been very happy with it. I bought it earlier this year to replace my aging WRT54GL which had run with Tomato for years.

I'm also a fan of OpenWrt, but I use the x86 build on a VM host, it acts as a router/firewall to other VMs in a private bridge.

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Fully agreed. OpenWrt's community is truly great, and the web interface (LuCI) used in the firmware has come on leaps and bounds in the past couple of years.

Also, if you ever need to roll your own firmware, prepare for a big uphill struggle with DD-WRT, but it's a (relative) breeze with OpenWrt.

I can vouch for this. I've run ddwrt on all my routers for some time, but it seems like they're no longer the favorite, for many reasons.

If I could do it all again, I'd go for OpenWRT, though in my case that's just because OpenWRT has some features that ddwrt is lacking (e.g. native IPv6).

Considering DD-WRT is simply a closed version of OpenWRT and this is HN... we should all be going for OpenWRT!

It's a pretty amazing little project.

My experience is exactly the opposite. I've been running DD-WRT since the very first version (right when BrainSlayer forked Sveasoft Alchemy), and it's an incredible piece of software. Absolutely flawless.

Yes, it is true that the wiki has conflicting information, but it's not that hard to find a version that works well with your set up. And most routers are really hard to brick (and worst case scenario most models have JTAG in the PCB, so you can un-brick your router even from the worst mistakes).

Once you have a stable config, you'll enjoy several years of rock-solid performance - at least until you need to upgrade your router again. Rinse and repeat.

FWIW, I'm using Asus RT-N16 with DD-WRT v24-sp2 (03/17/12) kingkong, and also used WRT-350N, WRT-54G/GL. All services I use are rock-solid: VPN, QoS, DynDNS, MAC filtering, USB storage, printer support, etc. Of course, YMMV.

Just to share my experience as this is one of the rare edge cases that I have encountered:

Switching from dd-wrt to Merlin's ASUSWRT, I find that it kinda screws with airplay.

When I play a movie, I'd usually select the sound to output to my Airplay speaker on my apple tv. After switching to Merlin's FW, I tried playing a movie and there was interference and distortion in the sound.

I suspect its due to the ethernet connection/port that brought about that problem since the issue went away when connecting the apple tv via wifi. I only use shielded cat5e cables btw. All in all, the problem went away when I switched back to dd-wrt.

I remembered spending a whole Sunday just to figure that out. Also, I'm not sure if its just isolated to Merlin's ASUSWRT since stock ASUSWRT might also be affected(I didn't test).

Another happy user of Merlin's version of asuswrt here. My RT-AC66U had mysteriously started getting itself into a funk overnight, which Merlin's version cured entirely.

On the negative side, making even trivial firewall changes such as adding or removing port forwarding rules still requires a router reboot. Apple routers do (or did) this too. I'd like to know who decided that this was an acceptable behavior.

I also loaded DD-WRT on the AC66U and it was unable to get the WAN interface moving. And Shibby's TomatoUSB suffered from show-stopping configuration bugs.

I'm also running Merlin's build on the RT-AC66U. 802.11ac speeds with custom firmware, excellent ui and a rich feature set.

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