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by wtallis 2882 days ago
> However, no router in that price point gives you the ability to easily expand past one AP, RADIUS VLAN support, the Unifi web interface and so forth.

You must be assuming that the user insists on sticking with broken vendor software, instead of switching to OpenWRT. The only software benefit that you don't get just as easily from OpenWRT is centralized management of multiple APs. Adding and configuring APs one at a time is very easy and since home networks never require more than 2-3 APs the lack of centralized management is not a significant issue. RADIUS and VLANs are fully supported by OpenWRT, and the web interface is fine except for the aforementioned limitation that you're only managing one AP at a time.

I suspect your stability issues with the ASUS router were a consequence of you using DD-WRT hobbled by proprietary WiFi drivers, instead of an OpenWRT-supported router. The DD-WRT "project" is a mess compared to OpenWRT, which actually puts out stable releases and operates more like a proper Linux distribution. Third-party firmware distributions aren't all the same.

1 comments

As far as I can tell, you can’t do dynamically assigned VLANs on wireless via RADIUS on ddwrt, at least not when I looked a few years ago.

I used Merlin ddwrt which was supposed to be dedicated to ASUS hardware. At some point fiddling with wrt takes more time than the nonexistent price difference with the ubiquiti equipment :)

I still can't speak directly to your problems with the ASUS router, because I deliberately avoid devices that require Broadcom's proprietary drivers that often prevent you from using a recent kernel, and I don't use DD-WRT when I have the option of using OpenWRT instead. But from what I can tell, the feature you're looking for has been in OpenWRT for years, though I've never bothered to use it myself: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/wireless.security.8021x#x...
Ah you’re right. Thanks for the link.

I didn’t use the ASUS for WiFi, just routing. My instability had to do with ipv6 issues - it would stop broadcasting RAs if I remember correctly causing intermittent connectivity issues. I would have to cycle power every so often (month or so?)

No such issues with the edgerouter. I’m sure OpenWRT works great for folks, I just found it wasn’t the right fit for me.