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by rossy 1987 days ago
I bought one of these (WRT1900ACS) when I was working from home last year. It's good, but not great. Before anyone else buys one of these for their open source "support," you should know that Linksys/Marvell basically threw a buggy open source WiFi driver over the wall, failed to upstream it to the Linux kernel due to issues with the code, and abandoned it.

Although it works fine for my simple purposes, there's a discussion of some of its issues at the end of this PR: https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/2397
1 comments
m463 1987 days ago
I have one and it works great for me. I'm not a heavy wifi user, mostly I want openwrt.

I've had several openwrt routers. Before this one I had a tp-link wdr4300, then an archer c7. The wrt1900acs has pretty fast, full-featured hardware.

I run firewall + adblock + privoxy + vlans. Because it has a USB port, I've added a USB GPS dongle so it does gps-based ntp time.

At first openwrt was a little daunting, but it has really grown on me.

One great thing about it is that the entire linux distribution is basically read-only, and all changes you make to your machine are in an infrequently-written overlay filesystem. If you back up /overlay/upper you will have all your config changes in a small tarball. All operations that do continuous writing like logfiles go to ramdisk, so it's easy on the flash and reliable during power failure.

Another thing is that if you follow the instructions, it's actually pretty straightforward to build openwrt for your specific configuration. I cut out the package manager and compiled everything I wanted into my image (or out of it, I turned off ipv6)

With a simple setup, you don't even have to bother with the gui. The config files are pretty simple and you can edit them directly.

I've also put openwrt on some network switches and once I got vlans going, my network got a lot more manageable.

I have a vlans:

- normal - machines can route to internet

- restricted - machines boot and have local dns - can get out (updates) only through the proxy

- test vlan - can't get to anything

the network switches are mikrotik and also running openwrt.

I have retired a rb750gl and rb2011ils, and now everything runs on a rb2011uias and a rb3011uias-rm (11 port)

I love the rb3011 - the rack mount tabs can be rotated 90 degrees and you can attach it under a shelf.

The two switches have SFP, and I can't help but think I should start messing with fiber.

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