GL.iNet worth a try? Any advantage over ASUS?

[dave14305]

Why not use the OEM firmware?

I unboxed the router today and booted with the OEM firmware. I was impressed and surprised to see it running an OpenWrt 23.05.0 base firmware. I updated to the latest GL.iNet release, rebooted and saw it’s now running a much older 21.02-SNAPSHOT release. Hard to imagine what required jumping back 2 major releases…

But I do like the interface of the OEM firmware. And the device is much more reasonably sized than the obese RT-AX88U Pro. As an AP, it should fit nicely side-by-side with my x86 OpenWrt router.

 

[eightiescalling]

I unboxed the router today and booted with the OEM firmware. I was impressed and surprised to see it running an OpenWrt 23.05.0 base firmware. I updated to the latest GL.iNet release, rebooted and saw it’s now running a much older 21.02-SNAPSHOT release. Hard to imagine what required jumping back 2 major releases…

But I do like the interface of the OEM firmware. And the device is much more reasonably sized than the obese RT-AX88U Pro. As an AP, it should fit nicely side-by-side with my x86 OpenWrt router.

Haven't caught up on it recently but, from memory, there was quite a bit of discussion on the Flint forums around wireless issues and dropping back to the older snapshot to deal with a driver issue.

A friend of mine is running one of these and says in general it's pretty solid - don't think he has "updated" to the older snapshot.

 

[Justinh]

I unboxed the router today and booted with the OEM firmware. I was impressed and surprised to see it running an OpenWrt 23.05.0 base firmware. I updated to the latest GL.iNet release, rebooted and saw it’s now running a much older 21.02-SNAPSHOT release. Hard to imagine what required jumping back 2 major releases…

But I do like the interface of the OEM firmware. And the device is much more reasonably sized than the obese RT-AX88U Pro. As an AP, it should fit nicely side-by-side with my x86 OpenWrt router.

They were having issues with the initial releases (people were very upset) with the drivers, they tried the new OpenWrt version, and, if I understand correctly, better drivers ended up in the older version they initially released with so they went back for now. They are developing both the older (original) OpenWrt version and the newer version in parallel. When they can get drivers and other issues worked out in the newer version they'll abandon the older one. Both branches are available for download.

 

[dave14305]

Yes, now I see the posts. I’ll install OpenWrt master within the next week.

Online update on GL-MT6000 installed OpenWRT 21.02

Hello, as Openwrt23.05 caused unstable WIFI for MT6000, we have adopted Openwrt21.02 in version 4.5.7.

forum.gl-inet.com

 

[thecheapseats]

the Flint 2 is a great device for the price... a few wifi growing pains but the company is very responsive...

 

[sfx2000]

I updated to the latest GL.iNet release, rebooted and saw it’s now running a much older 21.02-SNAPSHOT release. Hard to imagine what required jumping back 2 major releases…

Gah - this is one of those things where Vendor SDK's lag/fork from OpenWRT.

It looks like an older version, but it's not, as the Chipset Vendors tend to keep updates close...

 

[coxhaus]

I installed OpenWRT on an old router just to see what the original GUI looked like. I was looking to see how easy it was to do some simple tasks. One task was to toggle off Internet access for a client. Unless I am blind, the only way I could see to do this was to write a firewall rule for the client. So that was a bust.

I looked at the GL.iNet firmware docs and see they made the UI more user friendly and even have an interface to easily break (all) network access for a client. Still not what I wanted but would do most of the time.

Using a firewall for blocking is "the normal way" to control access to the internet.