Happy birthday to us

[maxbraketorque]

I think that ASUS wifi routers are fairly compelling on their own compared to what else is out there, but without a doubt your firmware makes them head-and-shoulders above any other brands. What's impressive is the range of features that you have added or improved compared to the stock firmware or any other brand of router firmware. There's something substantially useful for pretty much everyone, and it all works great. There have been a few "top 2020 wifi router" articles floating in the news these past couple weeks, and I find it unfortunate that none of these articles acknowledged the capability that you've brought to ASUS routers.

I think its also worth commending ASUS for fostering this project through their ongoing interactions with you. Would any other company do this? I'm not sure.

 

[pinkfloyd1173]

Thank you for all your hard work and all the help you have offered me and many others good sir.

 

[cybrnook]

Bring back memories?

 

[Tom Ames]

RMerlin,
Congratulations!

I passed on opening this thread several times as I thought it was going to be a snoozer. Boy, was I wrong! Interesting reading--and thanks for sharing some of your history. I have nothing but admiration for your skills and dedication.

Thanks for all your hard work!

 

[Vexira]

@RMerlin So may I ask in the early days were there may issues related to Nat acceleration and port forwarding, or users having issue with consoles and Nat types?

Also when ai protection first was released did it break anything and was it painful to work with?

 

[dosborne]

I learned a lot about working on embedded devices when I was involved in the WDLXTV project - a third party firmware aimed at various WDTV models.

If you worked on the 3rd party stuff for the DNS-323 NAS (FFP), then it's a trifecta! Never knew you worked on the b-rad stuff but these are pretty much the only 3 devices I ever ran 3rd party FW on. Thanks for all your work.

 

[Beherit]

Asuswrt-Merlin wasn't new territories for me as a software developer, since I had been involved in various software projects since the 90s, when I was developing software on the Amiga platform. My most popular project back then was probably NewIcons.

I used NewIcons back in the day. Amazing how many coders the good ol' Amiga produced that are still active today.

 

[RMerlin]

Would any other company do this?

I know that Voxel tried multiple times to reach out to Netgear to get support from them, and they basically ignored him.

@RMerlin So may I ask in the early days were there may issues related to Nat acceleration and port forwarding, or users having issue with consoles and Nat types?

As far as I know, since day one Asus has had forwarded port traffic bypass NAT acceleration, so it shouldn't cause any issue, beside the fact fact that forwarded traffic will me more CPU intensive. I believe some other manufacturers would flat out disable NAT acceleration whenever port forwarding is in use, so Asus's solution (or was it Broadcom's?) works fairly well.

Also when ai protection first was released did it break anything and was it painful to work with?

When AiProtection was first introduced, all the Asus portion of the code was open sourced, which allowed me to compile and enable it for the RT-AC56U before Asus enabled it for that model. It's only later on that they closed down its source. The Trend Micro portions were always closed, as I don't think even Asus gets its source code. But otherwise, AiProtection in itself didn't have any impact at all on my work.

If you worked on the 3rd party stuff for the DNS-323 NAS (FFP), then it's a trifecta!

No, only on the WDTV Live (and WDTV Live Plus).

 

[RMerlin]

I used NewIcons back in the day. Amazing how many coders the good ol' Amiga produced that are still active today.

A couple of years ago I received an email from Dale Luck. He was looking for more info on Asuswrt-Merlin for his Asus router, and found out that I was a former Amiga developer, so he decided to email me just to say "Hello". It felt weird to be personally emailed by someone that I used to admire back in the day (along with the other original Amiga designers). I also had the pleasure of talking with Carl Sassenrath back in the day (both over IRC and emails). Another brilliant, yet still very friendly and humble guy.

For those who don't know, Dale Luck was the guy who developed the graphic API of the original AmigaDOS, while Carl Sassenrath was the one who wrote almost on his own the micro-kernel (called Exec) that was at the core of AmigaOS. Think of him as the Linus Torvalds of AmigaOS. His kernel design was years ahead of everyone else at the time, including Apple's Mac System. The AmigaOS multitasking and inter-process communication capabilities were really revolutionary back then. And that kernel would fit in a couple of kilobytes...

Dale Luck was also involved in the 3DO software design, after he left Commodore.

 

[Frankflash]

when did and how long has the Miron become involved in this project

 

[rodenti]

Hey RMerlin, seems like I have been down a similar road as you. Started with Atari VCS, moved to VIC20 and C64 programming in high school, then onto C128 and Amiga. I also had a WDTV and faithfully used the WDLXTV firmware up until I replaced the device with an Android box a few years ago, and now I have a collection of Asus routers using your firmware.

Glad that you are continuing to keep your project alive with new AX routers, I'll probably move up to one of those in the near future.

Happy Anniversary to your Asuswrt-Merlin firmware, and hope to see many more anniversaries!


Sent from my SM-G975W using Tapatalk

 

[RMerlin]

when did and how long has the Miron become involved in this project

He got more actively involved a bit before I moved to 382, which was about 18 months ago I believe, but we had been chatting regularly for a while before that. For a lot of more technical stuff, he's my reference, as he has hands-on experience with a lot of that. Before that, he was involved in the WL500g custom firmware. He also contributed code to various other open source projects, like odhcp6c and dnsmasq. And, he's also one of the maintainers for Entware.

He's the only other person I currently trust with commit privileges to my Github repo.

 

[Milan]

thanks for your work here...

 

[JohnSmith]

No, only on the WDTV Live (and WDTV Live Plus).

Great to hear you were part of the development team for parts of WDTV Live and WDTV Live Plus, as I still own and use those portable media players, and they work fantastic for my downloadable media (too bad the firmware was discontinued for such a great and reliable product).

It's too bad they discontinued the product line of WDTV Live Media Player products, as they were still the best media players for their price, IMO.

 

[thelonelycoder]

It's been an interesting journey, ever since I joined into the Asuswrt-Merlin fun. With a steep learning curve in shell scripts.
May this go on for a while longer.

 

[rgnldo]

@RMerlin our Padawan Jedi. Congratulations to the FW Merlin project. May the runes protect us.

 

[skeal]

Congratulations Eric! This has been the best journey through the world of home routing anyone could have wanted! Thank you for your fine work and my second home.

 

[dave14305]

The ultimate personal question: any chance of an Eric photo? I'm too ugly to post my own photo (I'm sure Cloudflare would block it)...

 

[anotherengineer]

Happy Birthday/Anniversary!! 8 years!!

Time flies, I remember reading this site and Tim's stuff when it was a wing of Toms Hardware.........................I'm getting old.

Hopefully another 8+ good years to come!!

Cheers

 

[GHammer]

Happy Anniversary!

Brings back some fond memories of my A500.