Asuswrt-Merlin is now 10 years old!

[Reef2009]

@RMerlin I just donated 10USD to congratulate you for all the hard work and offers you made for us to make this firmware posible in the last 10years. You impacted the world including Asus it self!

Thnx!

 

[Unetwork]

Happy birthday
Good work with each release, the proof in pictures, no problem with the latest version for almost 8 days on my AX88U :

Congratulations !

 

[torstein]

I honestly have no idea. I doubt I will still be working on this in 10 years from now (as that would mean that the Asuswrt codebase itself would be 20+ years old by then). But since I didn't expect for this to reach the current state either, I could be wrong.

Of all the features, bug fixes and enhancements you have added, which one are you the most proud of?

 

[dave14305]

Of all the features, bug fixes and enhancements you have added, which one are you the most proud of?

If we turn this into a guessing game, I would guess he is most proud of the work he’s done with OpenVPN and most recently, VPN Director. But I think the most valuable feature is the custom configs and user script hooks to make the firmware super customizable.

 

[RMerlin]

Of all the features, bug fixes and enhancements you have added, which one are you the most proud of?

OpenVPN as a whole is probably the most impactful. After I ported the Tomato implementation, Asus reused my port to also add it to the stock firmware. While they did rewrite it from the ground up a year or two later (the software licence behind the originally ported code was unclear, which was also the reason why I ended up rewriting it myself last year), I don't know if/when that would have happened without my initial port of it.

 

[anotherengineer]

My old N66u is still kicking in my garage as an AP with John’s Merlin fork!!

 

[el pescador]

Remember one day searching for the Asus firmware upgrade site....the rest is history. Thank you Merlin

 

[arewhy]

Congratulations and Thank You Merlin! I cannot say that I've been along for the full ride, but I can say that when I bought the RT-AC88U in March 2016, my first ASUS router, it was because of the availability of your firmware! Prior to this, I had a D-Link DIR-825 that I purchased in 2010. It served me well, but with the proliferation of smart home devices/IOT devices it was time for an upgrade and the AC88U was a considerable upgrade

 

[Stranger]

Congrats and Happy Late Birthday!!!! I speak for everyone in saying thank you very much for every minute of the last 10 years you've put into this and looking forward to as many more as you bless us with!

 

[Ro berto]

Congratulations and thank you very much RMerlin, our quality of life has improved since we use Asuswrt-Merlin

 

[Seamaster]

Congratulations on the anniversary!
Many thanks for your time, expertise and philosophy on your excellent firmware.

 

[tomeradio]

@RMerlin
Just donated 30$ for your beautiful project.
Thank you very much!

 

[JSinFCVA]

Congratulations, and more importantly - Thanks for all you've done these past 10 years. I jumped on the bandwagon with my N66U way back when, and used Merlin firmware on every ASUS router I've owned since - AC86U and AX86U most recently. It has truly made my online life much more secure and glitch-free. Lets all hope we can celebrate with you again for the 20th anniversary (Though I'm sure that sounds scary to you. ;-) )

 

[SomeWhereOverTheRainBow]

In 2010 Asus announced a new high-end router to replace the RT-N16. I believe that new model was called the RT-N76U at the time. It was finally launched in Canada in early 2012 (a few months after the US launch), under the RT-N66U model name. I spent close to $200 CAD on that router to replace an old, modded Linksys router that was running either DD-WRT or Tomato (can't remember which I ran last on it).

On April 5th 2012 I released a modified firmware on the Asus VIP forums. The RM1 release included patches that I had applied on top of 3.0.0.3.108 GPL code. The project didn't have a formal name yet, "Tomato Regrowth" was the name I was considering, as these first few months were often spent re-enabling Tomato features that Asus had disabled when they forked it to create Asuswrt, such as SSH and HTTPS support. These archives also contain changelogs. Here's the very first one:



For the nostalgic, I have uploaded these first releases to Onedrive (which included the patch code within the archive), in the Museum folder: https://1drv.ms/f/s!AuCcWdNeYuXMixKSyygGPvuBAag6 Do not try to flash them however, they were for the RT-N66U original CFE which only supported 32KB of nvram.

Something old... and now something new. For those who are more interested in what's coming next, an early preview can be seen in the https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/test-builds folder of what has kept me (very) busy these past two weeks.

10 years of doing this is pretty incredible, I never expected this project to ever turn into what it has become today.

Happy birthday!

It is quite AMAIZING, and a testament to your overall commitment to your project. I hope we have you around for many more years to come.

 

[ninjabob]

Amazing achievement by one individual. My old N66u was 100% reliable (I have still got it as backup) after loading your firmware, I remember your firmware cured a Sonos issue everyone was having. Now I have your firmware running on my GT-AX11000 with two XT8 nodes running a fork of your firmware equally reliably. Your SMB version cured an indexing issue I was having with my Sonos library so very happy. Thanks for all your efforts.

 

[SomeWhereOverTheRainBow]

Amazing achievement by one individual. My old N66u was 100% reliable (I have still got it as backup) after loading your firmware, I remember your firmware cured a Sonos issue everyone was having. Now I have your firmware running on my GT-AX11000 with two XT8 nodes running a fork of your firmware equally reliably. Your SMB version cured an indexing issue I was having with my Sonos library so very happy. Thanks for all your efforts.

That has always been one of the greater benefits of RMerlin firmware versus stock, he does not only include better ingredients, he also provides the fixes to said ingredients as well. Better ingredients equals better router!

 

[Yota]

OpenVPN as a whole is probably the most impactful. After I ported the Tomato implementation, Asus reused my port to also add it to the stock firmware. While they did rewrite it from the ground up a year or two later (the software licence behind the originally ported code was unclear, which was also the reason why I ended up rewriting it myself last year), I don't know if/when that would have happened without my initial port of it.

Yes it is, before this I don't think many consumers could have imagined running an OpenVPN server/client on their router, I can say it's you who made this great feature popular, With more powerful CPUs and more router manufacturers adding this feature, you benefit a lot of people, Not just Asus consumers. take my Netgear router for example, after Asus added OpenVPN they also decided to add this feature.

As you work on implementing IPv6 on OpenVPN, you are taking it to the next level.


Over the years, you've made what many people wish for a reality, from SSH to the latest security fixes, many people benefit from these features and improvements that you bring.

The question is, what has this project brought you? I mean, how do you enjoy this project?

Happy birthday and thank you.

 

[Yota]

Whats a birthday without cake?!

Don't forget, RMerlin has brought the cake into our HND routers

 

[RMerlin]

Yes it is, before this I don't think many consumers could have imagined running an OpenVPN server/client on their router, I can say it's you who made this great feature popular, With more powerful CPUs and more router manufacturers adding this feature, you benefit a lot of people, Not just Asus consumers.

I'd like to give Tomato a part of the credit there. Without Tomato's OpenVPN implementation, I probably wouldn't have implemented it in Asuswrt-Merlin either, as my original implementation was a quite direct port of Tomato's code. So in a way, they got the ball rolling there.

The question is, what has this project brought you? I mean, how do you enjoy this project?

I like tinkering, as a hobby. Before Asuswrt-Merlin I was involved with the WDLXTV project. I also had various software projects over the years since back in my Amiga development days in 90's.

 

[Yota]

I'd like to give Tomato a part of the credit there. Without Tomato's OpenVPN implementation, I probably wouldn't have implemented it in Asuswrt-Merlin either, as my original implementation was a quite direct port of Tomato's code. So in a way, they got the ball rolling there.


I like tinkering, as a hobby. Before Asuswrt-Merlin I was involved with the WDLXTV project. I also had various software projects over the years since back in my Amiga development days in 90's.

You make things perfect, thank you.