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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I now only buy and recommend routers that are supported by OpenWRT even if the end user does not end up using it. Usually such support means that the device is fairly open and uses fairly standard hardware. Something new and esoteric is likely to be more buggy. OpenWRT is also a great OS. If your router supports it, please give it a try, for security's sake.

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I needed a new router recently to replace an Airport Extreme. I looked at gear supporting OpenWRT, Tomato, or DD-WRT. But I didn't want WiFi, and it was a PITA wading through the hardware lists.

I then came across the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. I had previous experience with Vyatta (of which EdgeOS is a fork), and was sold. I've been very happy with it.

What's wrong with having wifi onboard? You don't need to have it turned on.

Over a few dozen router purchases over the years, I've just settled on buying Buffalo DDwrt stock devices. If it runs that, it can run openWRT, and I'm happy. I don't have to dig around the openwrt hardware support forum or pray that I get the right revision of the model that works right.

And shipping foss firmware as the stock option wins my business. And they usually have ample onboard flash storage relative to their competitors for fun programs to run on the device.

Yeah, too bad they are still locked up for writing and do not include any overlay FS drivers...

That means the WRT1900AC is not one of your choices yet, right?

Also, I'm personally very bummed by the fact it has Marvell WiFi. They tend to be really mediocre and buggy, both in Windows, Linux and embedded applications.

I have been sticking to TP-LINK products lately. They and Buffalo seem pretty open and reasonably priced. Just a personal preference though. Lots of people I know are happy with Asus, Linksys, etc.

Also, from what I understand Microtik routers are a great alternative to OpenWRT, though I have not used them myself.

The mikrotik hardware is good but I find the documentation is poor and several times I have found their implementation of a feature is half baked. For instance their openvpn is over tcp only.

If you can make sure they do what you need and figure out how to set them up to achieve that they can be very cost effective. They are popular with the wireless ips crowd but have been facing strong competition from ubiquity.

Given the choice i buy ubiquity products, but they don't have as many "features".

Mikrotik have also been gpl violators.

I gave up on Mikrotik when I got one of their Switches, which explicitly have support for VLANs, and could only discover that the .. vlan..support was so botched that it couldn't make default VLAN's on different ports.

I think you have to "unslave" the ports from the master so they pass their packets up to the CPU, assign the ports to a bridge, and then the assign the bridge to a vlan.

It took me about 50 hours to figure out but I did manage to get three SSIDs on one radio, each of which would connect the client to a different vlan.

TP-Link WDR3600 is still the best value (non-AC), generally available, consumer grade dual band AP router on the market. Its ~impossible to get built-in modems with dual band Wifi on a functioning software stack, a separate HG612 (DSL) works great.

Microtik can be great value if you're willing to do lots of vendor QA (for other values of vendor) in your lab before going in to production. Most of the problems are to do with community: the docs are an unloved wiki which only staff can modify; release management, QA and bug tracking are third rate; and the forum is a passive-aggressive Engrish ghetto with poor moderation. But config management, CLI and Winbox are still better than straight Linux, and boards start at $40 which can make it worth it.

The WDR 4300 is on sale on newegg for under $50 after rebate, probably worth getting considering it's about the same price as the 3600 but has a slightly higher max bandwidth.

second that. TP-Link WDR3600 has been an awesome dual band (5 ghz)router that supports openwrt and has a a beefier RAM and CPU.

I assume you're judging based on client hardware? That may be an unfair comparison; AFAIK (working on enterprise wireless APs), they're mostly just known for catering to Cisco wireless AP radio chips (and doing well with those). Other markets are secondary.

Unfortunately, this means they don't care much about good drivers (including open source!) for anything other than Cisco's IOS.

Well, the large majority of home/SOHO APs/routers are Linux and my experience with Marvell-based devices in this segment was not good. I buy Atheros-based WiFi devices when I can.

Oh interesting - does the standard Linksys firmware use Linux too?

this page has a good overview of current routers with support for openwrt and dd-wrt http://rooftopbazaar.com/routerfirmware/

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