Thanks for covering OpenWrt. It's an amazing piece of tech that doesn't get the credit it deserves. I've fallen so in love with it that I got involved in the community and made my own builds for undocumented ISP routers.
Impeccable timing, literally earlier today I brought up OpenWRT in my workplace, we ended up flashing a small stack of decommissioned and discontinued APs with it. I got off my shift from doing that an hour and a half ago, that makes it roughly thirty minutes after I got off work you talk about the very thing I've been messing with for the day.
The easiest approach to test out OpenWRT is generally to have a different router available just in case your experiment goes awry. A cheap router that performs basic functions can be had for less than $30. Think of it as an emergency failback for that one time your ideas didn't pan out. If you don't, be sure to at least know how to hook your smart phone up to your computer and use it that way- before you start. The more you experiment, the more likely you'll need a failback. Word of advice: LUCI ( the interface used by OpenWRT ) is set so that if you lose connectivity when making changes, just wait 90 seconds and it should revert back... Don't panic and reset the box or pull the power plug.. WAIT.
Great coverage on OpenWRT! I've had nothing but a great experience running it on a cheap TP-Link Archer A7, and it is a dream compared to the other junk firmware that comes with consumer routers. Also, the front-end (LuCI) is incredible! It's relatively easy to install as well, I would highly suggest anyone with a spare router should absolutely install this and give it a shot! It's my main router right now and no problems in the slightest. It's the only software that's ever inspired me to join their community forum and try to contribute! Crazy.
Cannot recommend OpenWRT enough. I bought a number of Meraki routers at a city auction a few years ago for like $5 each. If I wanted to use the built-in Cisco firmware I would have had to pay a yearly license fee. Thanks to OpenWRT I was able to flash them (needed a UART) and actually use them in my and other family members' homes. Also was pretty straightforward to setup WireGuard between them so we could share a Jellyfin server. Could not recommend enough.
The latest firmware kinda bit me earlier this year. The firmware I had from TP-Link was dropping connection every hour or so. I found OpenWRT, flashed my router, and it has been stable since then. I had to buy a second hotspot for 2.4 ghz because the routers 2.4 ghz chip is closed source... So that was less than ideal. But I still didn't have to buy a whole new router. I'm super impressed with OpenWRT so far.
@@309electronics5 Not everyone can reverse engineer closed source components, but everyone can raise their voice for open sourcing drivers and hardware documentation. 😉
@@309electronics5 Yup, makes sense. It was a valuable lesson for me for future routers I buy and specifically looking for full OpenWRT support. I'm never going back to closed source after this year.
It's most awesome that you showed the entire flashing process in realtime, without which, I expect some folk might be inclined to pull the plug (obviously not good), thinking something is wrong.
Good stuff. I love OpenWRT. DD-WRT too I guess. Like you said about those missing binary blobs though, it can really hurt the device. I had one device that went from full gigabit line routing speed to 20-30 megabits because it lost hardware acceleration. I think it's probably a lot better on more modern processors that have enough horsepower to push the data without needing hardware acceleration.
You can enable hardware and software offloading in the firewall settings. That gives me about 800-900mps, even on slower devices. Though you cant use qos in that case
@@balazsrako9528I believe that's just shutting off some of the network stack to avoid some of the more CPU intensive work to boost packet throughput. It's not as good as a real hardware accelerator, but it still speeds things dramatically. There are some network chip offloads you can enable as well. Those are cooked into the kernel driver for the network chip. There are other proprietary silicon accelerators, like entire packet processors with stateful packet inspection, DMA engines, crypto engines, or weird virtualization things that need manufacturer binaries to work. The device will work fine without those features just running on software, but the hardware accelerators will be inactive.
@@balazsrako9528My mistake. OpenWRT does have support Hardware NAT Offload on some devices. Neat! But there are still going to be a ton of vendor closed binaries that won't have support.
@@balazsrako9528 on a Linksys EA4500 I have a delay of about 10 seconds util a website starts to load and also the speed at a speed test is 150 mbps and I have gigabyte fiber. I enabled hardware and software offloading and no change. Any idea why ?
*Note:* This video doesn't show the full steps. If you see the message indicating that you're in initramfs mode, this means your changes will be undone after a reboot. To finish the installation, you need to flash your router from OpenWrt upgrade interface, after which it'll be a persistent install. On some routers, you'll be able to just flash it from the stock firmware upgrade interface right away.
Nice. I used OpenWRT it's really nice. It's also a little limited to what hardware is on your router. For instance I couldn't install many packages because after installing OpenWRT it already had taken 80% of space. In addition I had to install packages dependencies manually. If a package required other package I had to find the other one and install it, and if that other one required some other, then I had to install that too and so on.
Pretty sure the absolutely necessary dependencies get selected automatically, and only optional dependencies are left out by default 🤔 From the OpenWRT package documentation: If you say +package [in the Makefile] that means if the current package is selected, it will cause package to be selected. This is the case with tcpdump above. It says that if tcpdump is selected, then select libpcap. e.g. DEPENDS:=+libpcap So, from the above we can see that package developers can define dependencies that must be selected automatically with their package.
I'm glad you made this because it's encouraging me to finally get around to it. I'll happily spend entirely too much time diving into pretty much anything except networking and printers but my frustration with this industry has reached critical mass. My area will have access to fiber soon and the thought of having uncapped upload speeds up to 2 gigabit makes me as excited as when my parents upgraded from dial-up back in the day. The upgraded NAS project I've been putting off is finally at the top of the list.
I just pulled an all nighter trying to switch my Archer C20 firmware with OpenWRT, holy cow, that was quite the challenge! In the end it was worth it, the sheer amount of settings it opened up for me is more than I bargained for! But it is a learning curve and careful not to brick your device... I was lucky mine had a workaround to fix it or I'd be in trouble! lol
Congratulations... I did the openwrt migration last year on 5 boxes. 1. box is the main router for the internal networks and control of outgoing load balancing and failover. This router controls outgoing load balancing (edgerouter 2 & 3 for 2 wireless internet connections - same provider) and failover (edgerouter 4 - for alternative internet connection via neighbors WiFi or my mobile phone) using Mwan3 software-module . Router 5 is a hardware reserve if edgerouter 2-4 burn down, as they are very cheap consumer boxes. Also the setup is configured for 2 ingoing VPNs (private and my company) and has currently 20 vlans and firewall administered security zones. The good thing is also that Wireshark can be used to remote traffik-analysis (via ssh) to inspect networking issues.
Been using openwrt for a suuuper long time, and used ddwrt back in the WRT54G days. It's also an awesome for making a software defined router in a VM and connecting all your VMs up to it if you want to test it out before flashing to your hardware, or need some sort of SDR for your use case (ie want to connect all your VMs to a VPN without having to do it on each one manually).
I have a router with openwrt. Flashed it a while back "for fun" actually and because I believe the connection is better and more stable (I can bypass ue limits if I want to when it comes to signal strength) but tbh I've just flashed it and didn't touch on it ever since 😂 works great all the time, TP-LINK C6 if I remember correctly
I currently run Merlin on my v2 AC68-U's. I'm a big fan of that line of routers. I may look into going full Foss now, thanks! PS: It was nice to hear those tracker tunes! It was like I was there running a Vitality key gen back in the day!
I'd say running an up-to-date firmware on your main, public facing, router is most important, so concider using OpenWRT on that, especially if the manufacturer stopped releasing updates. However, if you are using routers as access points, unless you don't trust the firmware the manufacturer provided, and/or are running those routers in a public setting (where many people might attempt to break into the router), you don't really need to install OpenWRT on them if the stock firmware does the job. I'm running OpenWRT on my main router (which I bought specifically because it was supported by OpenWRT), and 2 routers as access points at home (from those 2, 1 isn't supported, and the other has Broadcom)
OpenWrt and OpenSSH are the best opensource projects ever. Very cheap tp-link routers can be used for SSH tunneling after some RAM and FLASH storage upgrade, i will probably make a video about it in the future. OpenWrt router with enough flash and storage is basically a Linux development board 🙂
I use OpenWRT and installed in on my spare netbook with 2GB RAM. And man, this OS is amazing. I can install docker and make it a filesharing server, I can install OpenClash to make a pesudo tor network, I can install any linux apps basically. It's great, it only eats 100MB of RAM.
I‘m always panicking a bit when I install OpenWRT because it always feels like something is going wrong and it’s killing your router. But once installed, it's just great. And it never killed one of my routers :)
Yes, but let us not forget, that the ISP will, most of the time, not let you run anything else than what is provided and most if the time it is up to the ISP to do that. I would love to run open source firmware on my router/s, which for a local network is fine, but the outside router (most of time the DHCP server) is still under the ISPs control.
@@riongronberg1435 This depends. For example, I can use whatever router I want so long as I manage it. However, if you have a provider like AT&T, I've seen and heard in their terms of service that they require a termination of their service to their equipment. In that case, I would strongly recommend only using their router(as a modem) for it's ethernet port to your own managed router for wifi and other features.
I remember being dependant on my isp provided router. My port forwards would occasionally go missing. Turned out the isp pushed firmware. Wouldn't be surprised if basically all store bought routers have access for alphabet boys built in
huawei makes my router, but my isp gave it to me, it runs an isp edition of the firmware that basically just changes ome thing, you cannot change the dns server for dhcp
Your public facing router is the most important piece of equipment on a network. If it is not secure, no amount of security on the client side will make much difference. This is the problem I have with IPv6 which seems to want to force every client onto the public internet, instead of behind a NAT router.
Odd. From my experience private IPv6n IPs exist specifically for the use of pirvate connections and NAT. From How I've configured it in the past as a Network Engineer most platofrms I've worked with allow for both public assignments and NAT. However, my experience with consumer grade gear is very limited(because most of it sucks).
NAT is a dirty fix for ipv4 address scarcity. We don't have this problem with ipv6, so we don't use NAT! True end to end connectivity how it should be. For Security there are Firewalls. So that connections from the WAN are blocked. Every device has a public ipv6 address and the firewall blocks connections from the outside.
@@dragonhero14 IPv6 ULA (private addresses) are for local communication. If you have no IPv6 WAN connectivity but you need to speak v6 internally. Or you have a dynamic prefix allocated but you need static internal addressing. For communication with the outside world your computer uses its Global Unicast IPv6 Address. In 99% of the cases there is no need for NAT. Only Multihoming is an exception at the moment. And than you should use NPTv6 instead of NAT.
@@serrajoni1043 I guess it's not NAT in the exact same what for IPv6. But it's called NAT66 an it's used as a solution by several platforms for for replacing NAT when needed. There are larger scale reasons for NAT to exist with IPv6.
I ended up getting a bricked router and flashed the firmware through a UART serial connection. Maybe UART would be a neat subject you could cover in a video or something? Generally because you can use it to access a lot of hardware and dump/flash firmware.
Personally I use pfSense over OpenWRT and here's why - all of my machines are GNU / Linux based, if there ever were a zero day in GNU / Linux I'd be screwed. To be clear - I'm not saying OpenWRT is better or worse then pfSense, but in the unlikely event that a zero day was found in Linux, preventing attackers from getting to my router would be paramount since all of my systems are GNU / Linux based and would be vulnerable. In the unlikely event of a zero day on FreeBSD then the default firewalls of all of my Linux systems would protect those systems and my router would be the only thing compromised. I could be paranoid but the zero trust security model is always a good way to go. I also built my own router out of a SuperMicro server chassis, I'm not a fan of the junk hardware you get for $100 when for $150 you can get a full on server.
This but opnsense because pfsense devs are lame. Also, cheap 10G interfaces, VLANs, badass TIG stack dashboards, and run a trunk to a cheapo openwrt router that acts as a dumb AP for tons of wifi on different VLANs: separate your iot/guest/work/etc networks y’all.
@@duduoson1306 A dumb AP is a must I have an Intel Atom board running a pretty minimal install of debian w/ hostapd fot that, and a custom kernel driver I wrote for running a ST7735 display as my dashboard. No IoT crap aside from security cameras on their own ethernet VLAN and some stuff I've custom built running behind W5200s
I use it on a raspberry pi 4. Using a cheap USB gigabit Ethernet adapter and it works great. It also easily handles cake QSM to defeat bufferbloat. I use the built in Ethernet for my network and the USB one to connect to my modem. I think it's good up to 800mbps. Any higher and id be looking for a non USB based connection by using a compute module and board with 2.5gb Ethernet.
I need to get around to reflashing OpenWRT to my Netgear XR500 again. The only reason I abandoned it was because when I was moving, I had to connect my router to a router downstairs, as I wanted my own access points and things to be connected via ethernet, and for some reason it just wouldn't work right. Being able to have a network wide adblocker is a nice thing.
Even though I've been passingly involved in computers since kindergarten (in my school in the boonies of VA in like 1993 I was in a "special class" where we did basic stuff with computers... I think it was basically to test out the idea of actually having computer classes) Anyways long story short I didn't own a computer until I was about 17. My next door neighbor is apparently rich asf and I was able to get a open wi-fi signal for several years when we first built our house. I then essentially done the research on what I needed to redistribute the signal throughout my house so I could use my computer anywhere... Instead of being relegated to approximately 1 square foot😅 I ended up making a repeater out of an old Linksys router by running ddwrt... I even built a highly directional Wi-Fi antenna out of an old satellite dish📡 Anywhos my internet worked great and for free for like 5 years. I am fairly certain the ISP or someone probably set up a new router for the neighbor... Of course my network that I now pay for has a clever ssid that is unusual enough that it doesn't sound like a government spook right off the bat however if they Google my ssid it will probably scare the pants off of somebody 😂😂
The glowing one telling you what to install to your machine! Rebel, brothers! One day the technologies will fall! And also suggest you to use only one approach source of internet, that can be possible. Mental Outlaw, you won't trick us!
I was just wondering if you'd done a video on this. I use OpenWRT but rather than flashing the firmware on some crappy big box brand router I run it on an OrangePi R1 Plus solely as a router, No wifi, no DNS, no DHCP that's all handled elsewhere by things like pihole for dns and dhcp and I used TP link poweline adaptors / range extenders for wifi. I also have a managed switch with a dedicated DMZ netowrk on it's own vlan for my Tor relay node so if anything spooky happened to that since it has a port open to the world it's isolated from everything else
@@Look_What_You_Did Ha no it's very well engineerd. I've got 20 years under my belt as a Linux / AWS and network admin and I've seen some Rube Goldberg shit in my time at some very large companies I've worked for. My setup is stupid simple in comparison but it's certainly a bit of a rats nest though. I'm not married though so I get away with shit like that. Occasianly there's some interesting stuff on this channel that's a ways outside my usual bubble so ther's always something to learn
I have openwrt on my router. I had to find some fixes for WiFi antenna stuff related for my particular router and build an image from source. But upgrading the router to new version is much easier, only had to patch it with custom image for the first time
1:25 Not that I did not considered it. First time I flashed Tomato (another firmware) in my life was on my WNR3500L in 2010 when I was still underaged kid. Imagine managing to get it thru with father who never agrees to anything. Trick was that I bought the router and I configured it and offered it to parents since their setup succced really horribly, and my setup was marketably better. Still horrible since the pipe was ADSL2 based, but you could press f5 on 2 computers on lan at once without 5 second lag.
I remember working on openwrt firmware based router back in 2017, my than ceo had asked me that, since openwrt is unix and freebsd based firmware so technically a kali linux(gui one) can also run a Linksys router. To which i had replied not yet please get back to me in 2077😂
@@dfgdfg_ Largely the same, but includes several packages pre-installed and some kernel optimizations. I prefer the GUI over OpenWRT's LuCI. The maintainer of the project has a forum that is super responsive to questions.
I'm using openwrt but only as AP/switch, as my Firewall/router I'm using pfsense, for me its way much better. But I still think that OpenWRT is a great solution
Unfortunately, OpenWrt doesn’t work on Apple Airport Extreme yet. I have an old one of those that I want to repurpose as a switch and for now I just need to use the stock firmware and software (I think the OS is NetBSD). It’s probably OK since I’ll have the antennas disabled and the device will be behind a firewall, but still a bummer. I wanted an excuse to get into OpenWrt without obtaining more hardware, and configuring a simple switch seemed like a low-risk introduction.
@@Look_What_You_Did I’ve replaced macOS with Linux (Fedora and Debian) on two old Macs with no trouble. Was thinking it would be relatively easy to do something similar with Airports, but I was wrong. Still holding out on the possibility someday.
I installed tor client gateway last month using openwrt as you sugested. I didn’t felt good and felt like i am under surveillance all the time. So i ditched it 😂
Would be good to note that you are running in initramfs, you haven't actually installed OpenWrt at this point. You need to then sysupgrade to actually complete the install.
I had home experience with two alternative router firmware: OpenWRT on a TP-Link router and RouterOS on a Mikrotik device. And in my opinion, OpenWRT is a messy toy that is somehow more broken than RouterOS. After doing an update, having to reset it because I locked myself out and then restoring the old configuration 1:1 it for some reason still refused to work. No one ever uses it in a professional environment for a good reason, not everything that's FOSS is gold. Meanwhile RouterOS, for all it's flaws, has an amazing amount of functionality, and Mikrotik constantly supports their oldest hardware with the newest version of their firmware, which can't be said about ISP routers or regular consumer routers like TP-Link. Hell, even Cisco or Ubiquiti doesn't offer this much long-term support! I honestly fell in love with what these devices can do and I wouldn't imagine buying any other home network hardware that isn't Mikrotik at this point.
a VoIP phone i set up for my grandparents actually came with a GPLv3 pamphlet and resources to get the source code to the firmware... extremely weird seeing that in an actual consumer device!
Hey, i wanted to try OpenWrt but i couldnt install it on my device, because i got no support for it. Can you make a video to show other alternatives and what to do if it is not supported?
Thanks for covering OpenWrt. It's an amazing piece of tech that doesn't get the credit it deserves. I've fallen so in love with it that I got involved in the community and made my own builds for undocumented ISP routers.
Thanks for contributing, we don’t thank enough people contributing to open source projects
just get a luxul
bro can you help me with my weird ahh router?
Undocumented routers sounds like euphemism for illegal migration xD
@@onepalesoul😂😂😂
Impeccable timing, literally earlier today I brought up OpenWRT in my workplace, we ended up flashing a small stack of decommissioned and discontinued APs with it. I got off my shift from doing that an hour and a half ago, that makes it roughly thirty minutes after I got off work you talk about the very thing I've been messing with for the day.
Bro we becoming one 😅
Ok
The easiest approach to test out OpenWRT is generally to have a different router available just in case your experiment goes awry. A cheap router that performs basic functions can be had for less than $30. Think of it as an emergency failback for that one time your ideas didn't pan out.
If you don't, be sure to at least know how to hook your smart phone up to your computer and use it that way- before you start.
The more you experiment, the more likely you'll need a failback.
Word of advice: LUCI ( the interface used by OpenWRT ) is set so that if you lose connectivity when making changes, just wait 90 seconds and it should revert back... Don't panic and reset the box or pull the power plug.. WAIT.
I got a 20 port PoE router / switch for $7 at a thrift store 😅
Great coverage on OpenWRT! I've had nothing but a great experience running it on a cheap TP-Link Archer A7, and it is a dream compared to the other junk firmware that comes with consumer routers. Also, the front-end (LuCI) is incredible! It's relatively easy to install as well, I would highly suggest anyone with a spare router should absolutely install this and give it a shot! It's my main router right now and no problems in the slightest.
It's the only software that's ever inspired me to join their community forum and try to contribute! Crazy.
It's really hard to install newest tp link routers.
@@Ulvis_Bshould check Table of hardware first
You are my favorite black man
You are my favorite white kid
He's black? I thought he was northern Japanese
am I in your top 3 @@meinteybergen4617
Based
Cannot recommend OpenWRT enough.
I bought a number of Meraki routers at a city auction a few years ago for like $5 each. If I wanted to use the built-in Cisco firmware I would have had to pay a yearly license fee. Thanks to OpenWRT I was able to flash them (needed a UART) and actually use them in my and other family members' homes.
Also was pretty straightforward to setup WireGuard between them so we could share a Jellyfin server. Could not recommend enough.
UART is such a useful tool. You can even look for bricked routers if you can find them and potentially fix them through a UART connection.
Meraki for 5$ is crazy 😂🎉 damn
OpenWRT is the best base for developers of networking solutions (hardware and software)
Been using OpenWRT for years and couldn't be happier
The latest firmware kinda bit me earlier this year. The firmware I had from TP-Link was dropping connection every hour or so. I found OpenWRT, flashed my router, and it has been stable since then.
I had to buy a second hotspot for 2.4 ghz because the routers 2.4 ghz chip is closed source... So that was less than ideal. But I still didn't have to buy a whole new router. I'm super impressed with OpenWRT so far.
Its an amazing project but we cant do anything about closed source things/components
@@309electronics5 Not everyone can reverse engineer closed source components, but everyone can raise their voice for open sourcing drivers and hardware documentation. 😉
@@309electronics5 Yup, makes sense. It was a valuable lesson for me for future routers I buy and specifically looking for full OpenWRT support. I'm never going back to closed source after this year.
@@309electronics5 They can be reverse engineered.
@@309electronics5reverse them? 😁
It's most awesome that you showed the entire flashing process in realtime, without which, I expect some folk might be inclined to pull the plug (obviously not good), thinking something is wrong.
Jayson Tatum knows about wireless routers and how to route an untalented team in the NBA. Thanks for another great video!
lmao I wanna know how many times hes gotten mistaken for Jayson Tatum irl
Good stuff. I love OpenWRT. DD-WRT too I guess. Like you said about those missing binary blobs though, it can really hurt the device. I had one device that went from full gigabit line routing speed to 20-30 megabits because it lost hardware acceleration. I think it's probably a lot better on more modern processors that have enough horsepower to push the data without needing hardware acceleration.
You can enable hardware and software offloading in the firewall settings. That gives me about 800-900mps, even on slower devices.
Though you cant use qos in that case
@@balazsrako9528I believe that's just shutting off some of the network stack to avoid some of the more CPU intensive work to boost packet throughput. It's not as good as a real hardware accelerator, but it still speeds things dramatically. There are some network chip offloads you can enable as well. Those are cooked into the kernel driver for the network chip. There are other proprietary silicon accelerators, like entire packet processors with stateful packet inspection, DMA engines, crypto engines, or weird virtualization things that need manufacturer binaries to work. The device will work fine without those features just running on software, but the hardware accelerators will be inactive.
@@balazsrako9528My mistake. OpenWRT does have support Hardware NAT Offload on some devices. Neat! But there are still going to be a ton of vendor closed binaries that won't have support.
I'm pretty happy with DD-WRT in my Netgear router, is just an amazing swiss knife.
@@balazsrako9528 on a Linksys EA4500 I have a delay of about 10 seconds util a website starts to load and also the speed at a speed test is 150 mbps and I have gigabyte fiber. I enabled hardware and software offloading and no change. Any idea why ?
*Note:* This video doesn't show the full steps. If you see the message indicating that you're in initramfs mode, this means your changes will be undone after a reboot. To finish the installation, you need to flash your router from OpenWrt upgrade interface, after which it'll be a persistent install. On some routers, you'll be able to just flash it from the stock firmware upgrade interface right away.
That is the easy part!
Now the hard part is making sense of the menu and of the wiki!
This video couldnt come at a more perfect time.
I'm just moving and thinking of getting my own hardware for our home network setup.
Nice. I used OpenWRT it's really nice. It's also a little limited to what hardware is on your router. For instance I couldn't install many packages because after installing OpenWRT it already had taken 80% of space. In addition I had to install packages dependencies manually. If a package required other package I had to find the other one and install it, and if that other one required some other, then I had to install that too and so on.
Interesting a router was so space limited. Not that I know much on the topic, out of curiosity how much storage did it have?
Pretty sure the absolutely necessary dependencies get selected automatically, and only optional dependencies are left out by default 🤔
From the OpenWRT package documentation:
If you say +package [in the Makefile] that means if the current package is selected, it will cause package to be selected. This is the case with tcpdump above. It says that if tcpdump is selected, then select libpcap. e.g.
DEPENDS:=+libpcap
So, from the above we can see that package developers can define dependencies that must be selected automatically with their package.
@@bigiron4018 It was TP-Link TL-WDR4300 (N750) It's listed in OpenWRT docs. 128 MB. Edit: actually 8MB
@@tomaszgiba its RAM. Your router has only 8 MB of storage.
that's true.. unbelievable @@mk72v2oq
The thumbnails should be universally recognised as contemporary art, they are superb hehe.
Amazing deepfake as always, Luke.
Chat, is this real
@@darukutsuyea sure
He disappeared to focus on his second channel mental outlaw
bros opsec wasn’t good enough 💀
lmao
I'm glad you made this because it's encouraging me to finally get around to it. I'll happily spend entirely too much time diving into pretty much anything except networking and printers but my frustration with this industry has reached critical mass. My area will have access to fiber soon and the thought of having uncapped upload speeds up to 2 gigabit makes me as excited as when my parents upgraded from dial-up back in the day. The upgraded NAS project I've been putting off is finally at the top of the list.
I just pulled an all nighter trying to switch my Archer C20 firmware with OpenWRT, holy cow, that was quite the challenge! In the end it was worth it, the sheer amount of settings it opened up for me is more than I bargained for! But it is a learning curve and careful not to brick your device... I was lucky mine had a workaround to fix it or I'd be in trouble! lol
Congratulations... I did the openwrt migration last year on 5 boxes. 1. box is the main router for the internal networks and control of outgoing load balancing and failover. This router controls outgoing load balancing (edgerouter 2 & 3 for 2 wireless internet connections - same provider) and failover (edgerouter 4 - for alternative internet connection via neighbors WiFi or my mobile phone) using Mwan3 software-module . Router 5 is a hardware reserve if edgerouter 2-4 burn down, as they are very cheap consumer boxes. Also the setup is configured for 2 ingoing VPNs (private and my company) and has currently 20 vlans and firewall administered security zones. The good thing is also that Wireshark can be used to remote traffik-analysis (via ssh) to inspect networking issues.
Been using openwrt for a suuuper long time, and used ddwrt back in the WRT54G days. It's also an awesome for making a software defined router in a VM and connecting all your VMs up to it if you want to test it out before flashing to your hardware, or need some sort of SDR for your use case (ie want to connect all your VMs to a VPN without having to do it on each one manually).
I think a lot of people would've benefited from seeing Step 7 being done especially on a Linux box.
I just wrote the same comment. The most crucial step just skipped over.
I have a router with openwrt. Flashed it a while back "for fun" actually and because I believe the connection is better and more stable (I can bypass ue limits if I want to when it comes to signal strength) but tbh I've just flashed it and didn't touch on it ever since 😂 works great all the time, TP-LINK C6 if I remember correctly
I currently run Merlin on my v2 AC68-U's. I'm a big fan of that line of routers. I may look into going full Foss now, thanks!
PS: It was nice to hear those tracker tunes! It was like I was there running a Vitality key gen back in the day!
I'd say running an up-to-date firmware on your main, public facing, router is most important, so concider using OpenWRT on that, especially if the manufacturer stopped releasing updates. However, if you are using routers as access points, unless you don't trust the firmware the manufacturer provided, and/or are running those routers in a public setting (where many people might attempt to break into the router), you don't really need to install OpenWRT on them if the stock firmware does the job.
I'm running OpenWRT on my main router (which I bought specifically because it was supported by OpenWRT), and 2 routers as access points at home (from those 2, 1 isn't supported, and the other has Broadcom)
Finally! I have been waiting for OpenWRT video
OpenWrt and OpenSSH are the best opensource projects ever. Very cheap tp-link routers can be used for SSH tunneling after some RAM and FLASH storage upgrade, i will probably make a video about it in the future. OpenWrt router with enough flash and storage is basically a Linux development board 🙂
I use OpenWRT and installed in on my spare netbook with 2GB RAM. And man, this OS is amazing. I can install docker and make it a filesharing server, I can install OpenClash to make a pesudo tor network, I can install any linux apps basically. It's great, it only eats 100MB of RAM.
OpenWrt is easily one of the best open source projects ever
I‘m always panicking a bit when I install OpenWRT because it always feels like something is going wrong and it’s killing your router. But once installed, it's just great. And it never killed one of my routers :)
LMAO your thumbnails are always so good.
Yes, but let us not forget, that the ISP will, most of the time, not let you run anything else than what is provided and most if the time it is up to the ISP to do that. I would love to run open source firmware on my router/s, which for a local network is fine, but the outside router (most of time the DHCP server) is still under the ISPs control.
That's only if you use the ISP provided router. I only have a modem from my ISP and run OPNsense on a standalone router
@@riongronberg1435 This depends. For example, I can use whatever router I want so long as I manage it. However, if you have a provider like AT&T, I've seen and heard in their terms of service that they require a termination of their service to their equipment. In that case, I would strongly recommend only using their router(as a modem) for it's ethernet port to your own managed router for wifi and other features.
I think my country just added a law going in to next year that, customers can use their own routers
Bridge that ISP modem mofo and connect openwrt router to that. Worked for me idk 🤷♂️
I remember being dependant on my isp provided router. My port forwards would occasionally go missing. Turned out the isp pushed firmware. Wouldn't be surprised if basically all store bought routers have access for alphabet boys built in
My ISP requires a fucking APP to manage the router, no web interface
@@total_epicness6776 bröther they in your phone too now👍
@@total_epicness6776😂
huawei makes my router, but my isp gave it to me, it runs an isp edition of the firmware that basically just changes ome thing, you cannot change the dns server for dhcp
@@total_epicness6776🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Your public facing router is the most important piece of equipment on a network. If it is not secure, no amount of security on the client side will make much difference. This is the problem I have with IPv6 which seems to want to force every client onto the public internet, instead of behind a NAT router.
Odd. From my experience private IPv6n IPs exist specifically for the use of pirvate connections and NAT. From How I've configured it in the past as a Network Engineer most platofrms I've worked with allow for both public assignments and NAT. However, my experience with consumer grade gear is very limited(because most of it sucks).
NAT is a dirty fix for ipv4 address scarcity.
We don't have this problem with ipv6, so we don't use NAT!
True end to end connectivity how it should be.
For Security there are Firewalls.
So that connections from the WAN are blocked.
Every device has a public ipv6 address and the firewall blocks connections from the outside.
@@dragonhero14
IPv6 ULA (private addresses) are for local communication. If you have no IPv6 WAN connectivity but you need to speak v6 internally. Or you have a dynamic prefix allocated but you need static internal addressing. For communication with the outside world your computer uses its Global Unicast IPv6 Address.
In 99% of the cases there is no need for NAT. Only Multihoming is an exception at the moment. And than you should use NPTv6 instead of NAT.
IPV6 has no NAT only IPV4.
@@serrajoni1043 I guess it's not NAT in the exact same what for IPv6. But it's called NAT66 an it's used as a solution by several platforms for for replacing NAT when needed. There are larger scale reasons for NAT to exist with IPv6.
I ended up getting a bricked router and flashed the firmware through a UART serial connection. Maybe UART would be a neat subject you could cover in a video or something? Generally because you can use it to access a lot of hardware and dump/flash firmware.
Personally I use pfSense over OpenWRT and here's why - all of my machines are GNU / Linux based, if there ever were a zero day in GNU / Linux I'd be screwed. To be clear - I'm not saying OpenWRT is better or worse then pfSense, but in the unlikely event that a zero day was found in Linux, preventing attackers from getting to my router would be paramount since all of my systems are GNU / Linux based and would be vulnerable. In the unlikely event of a zero day on FreeBSD then the default firewalls of all of my Linux systems would protect those systems and my router would be the only thing compromised. I could be paranoid but the zero trust security model is always a good way to go. I also built my own router out of a SuperMicro server chassis, I'm not a fan of the junk hardware you get for $100 when for $150 you can get a full on server.
This but opnsense because pfsense devs are lame. Also, cheap 10G interfaces, VLANs, badass TIG stack dashboards, and run a trunk to a cheapo openwrt router that acts as a dumb AP for tons of wifi on different VLANs: separate your iot/guest/work/etc networks y’all.
@@duduoson1306 A dumb AP is a must I have an Intel Atom board running a pretty minimal install of debian w/ hostapd fot that, and a custom kernel driver I wrote for running a ST7735 display as my dashboard. No IoT crap aside from security cameras on their own ethernet VLAN and some stuff I've custom built running behind W5200s
using wrt for i while, awesome stuff
OpenWRT is so great!
Love those tutorials, keep em comming!
I use it on a raspberry pi 4. Using a cheap USB gigabit Ethernet adapter and it works great.
It also easily handles cake QSM to defeat bufferbloat.
I use the built in Ethernet for my network and the USB one to connect to my modem. I think it's good up to 800mbps.
Any higher and id be looking for a non USB based connection by using a compute module and board with 2.5gb Ethernet.
doing god's work as always
absolutely love OpenWRT will never run a router again without it 👍
I'm a Asuswrt-Merlin enjoyer myself.
Would love a video on the GL-inet routers. The travel ones are cool and come with openWRT
I need to get around to reflashing OpenWRT to my Netgear XR500 again. The only reason I abandoned it was because when I was moving, I had to connect my router to a router downstairs, as I wanted my own access points and things to be connected via ethernet, and for some reason it just wouldn't work right.
Being able to have a network wide adblocker is a nice thing.
Make a FOSS app list for android / Windows.
I have been watching your videos all week. Keep up the amazing job, man. Thank you!
Please make a video about all the cool stuff you can do on OpenWrt :)
I used to use DD-wrt to create bridges on cheap linksys routers in the early 2000's.
Even though I've been passingly involved in computers since kindergarten (in my school in the boonies of VA in like 1993 I was in a "special class" where we did basic stuff with computers... I think it was basically to test out the idea of actually having computer classes)
Anyways long story short I didn't own a computer until I was about 17. My next door neighbor is apparently rich asf and I was able to get a open wi-fi signal for several years when we first built our house. I then essentially done the research on what I needed to redistribute the signal throughout my house so I could use my computer anywhere... Instead of being relegated to approximately 1 square foot😅
I ended up making a repeater out of an old Linksys router by running ddwrt... I even built a highly directional Wi-Fi antenna out of an old satellite dish📡
Anywhos my internet worked great and for free for like 5 years. I am fairly certain the ISP or someone probably set up a new router for the neighbor... Of course my network that I now pay for has a clever ssid that is unusual enough that it doesn't sound like a government spook right off the bat however if they Google my ssid it will probably scare the pants off of somebody 😂😂
Sounds great, I'll give it a try, thanx!!
Have been using dd-wrt for years, much better than factory f/w
Man this wisdom is learned in 2007
My Asus router was unstable and even unable to serve the UI on default fw. Changing to AsusWRT made everything better. Good luck to OpenWRT!
good video kinda cool because i was looking for the old fresh tomato vid yesterday lol
The glowing one telling you what to install to your machine! Rebel, brothers! One day the technologies will fall! And also suggest you to use only one approach source of internet, that can be possible. Mental Outlaw, you won't trick us!
I've run DD-WRT and OpenWRT on some consumer stuff, great project but moved to opnsense now a days.
my man got the duu on lets goo
I was just wondering if you'd done a video on this. I use OpenWRT but rather than flashing the firmware on some crappy big box brand router I run it on an OrangePi R1 Plus solely as a router, No wifi, no DNS, no DHCP that's all handled elsewhere by things like pihole for dns and dhcp and I used TP link poweline adaptors / range extenders for wifi. I also have a managed switch with a dedicated DMZ netowrk on it's own vlan for my Tor relay node so if anything spooky happened to that since it has a port open to the world it's isolated from everything else
@@Look_What_You_Did Ha no it's very well engineerd. I've got 20 years under my belt as a Linux / AWS and network admin and I've seen some Rube Goldberg shit in my time at some very large companies I've worked for. My setup is stupid simple in comparison but it's certainly a bit of a rats nest though. I'm not married though so I get away with shit like that. Occasianly there's some interesting stuff on this channel that's a ways outside my usual bubble so ther's always something to learn
Dewie looks so good luke.
ROUTER: How the NSA slurps your traffic
I have openwrt on my router. I had to find some fixes for WiFi antenna stuff related for my particular router and build an image from source. But upgrading the router to new version is much easier, only had to patch it with custom image for the first time
1:25 Not that I did not considered it. First time I flashed Tomato (another firmware) in my life was on my WNR3500L in 2010 when I was still underaged kid. Imagine managing to get it thru with father who never agrees to anything. Trick was that I bought the router and I configured it and offered it to parents since their setup succced really horribly, and my setup was marketably better. Still horrible since the pipe was ADSL2 based, but you could press f5 on 2 computers on lan at once without 5 second lag.
This is me pretending to understand and implement everything I just heard. Thank you.
What music did you use in the video montage bit?
Need of the day 👍
"Become a remote blackhat network administrator" hahah now that is some good comedy right there
I remember working on openwrt firmware based router back in 2017, my than ceo had asked me that, since openwrt is unix and freebsd based firmware so technically a kali linux(gui one) can also run a Linksys router. To which i had replied not yet please get back to me in 2077😂
The Gargoyle variant is a great firmware as well.
What does it give you over openwrt?
@@dfgdfg_ Largely the same, but includes several packages pre-installed and some kernel optimizations. I prefer the GUI over OpenWRT's LuCI. The maintainer of the project has a forum that is super responsive to questions.
I'm using openwrt but only as AP/switch, as my Firewall/router I'm using pfsense, for me its way much better. But I still think that OpenWRT is a great solution
Pf sense just got exploited ....check the CVE and CISA for details man.
why not use opensense?
@@angelo3805 makes sense. 😁👍🏻
Me too. I want to separate my router and my access point. My AP is an old Netgear router with ddwrt
@@angelo3805 To be honest... I don't know, I just started using pfSense and it works for me. I can use OPNsense instead.
Great video!
Unfortunately, OpenWrt doesn’t work on Apple Airport Extreme yet. I have an old one of those that I want to repurpose as a switch and for now I just need to use the stock firmware and software (I think the OS is NetBSD). It’s probably OK since I’ll have the antennas disabled and the device will be behind a firewall, but still a bummer. I wanted an excuse to get into OpenWrt without obtaining more hardware, and configuring a simple switch seemed like a low-risk introduction.
@@Look_What_You_Did I’ve replaced macOS with Linux (Fedora and Debian) on two old Macs with no trouble. Was thinking it would be relatively easy to do something similar with Airports, but I was wrong. Still holding out on the possibility someday.
Yes more tutorials!!!!
Thanks for the content, please a video with the best modules to install from openwrt
I installed tor client gateway last month using openwrt as you sugested. I didn’t felt good and felt like i am under surveillance all the time. So i ditched it 😂
The AntiChrist provides SaaS for all of your networking needs. The main selling point is their “deferred payment” financing model.
Would be good to note that you are running in initramfs, you haven't actually installed OpenWrt at this point. You need to then sysupgrade to actually complete the install.
oh, I have such a router too, I'm gonna try installing OpenWRT on it :D
Would you trust Ubiquiti enough to not switch to OpenWRT?
another nice guide
I had home experience with two alternative router firmware: OpenWRT on a TP-Link router and RouterOS on a Mikrotik device. And in my opinion, OpenWRT is a messy toy that is somehow more broken than RouterOS. After doing an update, having to reset it because I locked myself out and then restoring the old configuration 1:1 it for some reason still refused to work. No one ever uses it in a professional environment for a good reason, not everything that's FOSS is gold.
Meanwhile RouterOS, for all it's flaws, has an amazing amount of functionality, and Mikrotik constantly supports their oldest hardware with the newest version of their firmware, which can't be said about ISP routers or regular consumer routers like TP-Link. Hell, even Cisco or Ubiquiti doesn't offer this much long-term support! I honestly fell in love with what these devices can do and I wouldn't imagine buying any other home network hardware that isn't Mikrotik at this point.
thanks black luke smith
asking for Europe shipping on based win day 10, really want that hoodie, love your content ❤
Gotta make sure we're compliant with all them laws and shit, will probably happen after I get my licenses to sell farm stuff here in USA
@@MentalOutlaw thanks for letting us know!
sadge@@MentalOutlaw
Do you accept cookies?
@@7eislol
Algorithm and thanks for covering this.
Hey I really like that you rock your own Merch. I would like to cop an oversized T . . .
1:53 if the data sent to the router is already encripted then no big deal
I can't find any DSL routers supported by open wrt or alternatives for sale where I live sadly
The music. 🕺🕺🕺🕺
a VoIP phone i set up for my grandparents actually came with a GPLv3 pamphlet and resources to get the source code to the firmware... extremely weird seeing that in an actual consumer device!
Lmao I love your delivery.
Sick durag on the deepfake my wigga
Lol i just recently looked into this. Nice.
Been using a Pi4b as a router for a while now with OpenWRT.
yo love this content
Hey, i wanted to try OpenWrt but i couldnt install it on my device, because i got no support for it. Can you make a video to show other alternatives and what to do if it is not supported?
Add a Jtag to that giga chad.
Luke if someday you read this I hope come back with your channel
Openwrt such a chad move on my cpe 220
Hey thats my router in your thumbnail
I use dd-wrt because openwrt doesn't come with proprietary blobs required for the hardware that I have. Configuration is also MUCH easier on ddwrt.
you should cover MPTCP next!