Netgear xr500 your experiences with this router.

[avtella]

Yeah I need to try LEDE with cake sometime. Really the GEO filter is what sets the Duma OS apart from other routers, it works! When I was playing COD WWII, if I changed my geo location to the East coast I would be beasting and feasting but that only lasted a month. LOL. I guess need to find another server to play on!

Make sure to use the simpler Piece of Cake option not the full fledged Cake which I believe works best with tagged traffic.

 

[Voxel]

I did it because i get lower speed on my LAN i got 80-86mbps but on th WIFI i got 127-130mbps
with Voxels i get same speed on both network 127-130mbps and it did not worked in AP mode for me, hove much i tried.

To improve the speed it is necessary to change the source codes. And to perform own compilation/optimization. De facto this fw is just hack of binary original firmware for XR500 made by NG (except samba extracted in binary form from my 1.0.2.50SF). I.e. it is product of NG developers (and developers from DumaOS). So the same not optimal compilation options, the same outdated packages etc.

Voxel.

 

[XVortex]

Well, I can try to replace the openssl libs on those that use Voxel in his firmware.
Plus, there are several other common libraries that do not depends on DumaOS.
Recompilation is certainly good, but Voxel's fw also has a bunch of closed source NG/Qualcomm blobs which is also good to recompile...

 

[XSXS]

Well, I can try to replace the openssl libs on those that use Voxel in his firmware.
Plus, there are several other common libraries that do not depends on DumaOS.
Recompilation is certainly good, but Voxel's fw also has a bunch of closed source NG/Qualcomm blobs which is also good to recompile...

Xvortex, is there any performance loss using the Duma OS on the R7800?

 

[Voxel]

Recompilation is certainly good, but Voxel's fw also has a bunch of closed source NG/Qualcomm blobs which is also good to recompile...

I estimate them as not more than 10 per cents of all other codes. It is IMO about the same as e.g. percentage of enclosed codes used by RMerlin (his job you are suing for R7000).

Well, I can try to replace the openssl libs on those that use Voxel in his firmware.
Plus, there are several other common libraries that do not depends on DumaOS.

Such selective "improvements" is possible of course. Not all, but selective. The same as for example to include some backdoor and rootkits into this version, right?

Overall you have some real talents in this area. Is not it more interesting for you to apply them to do real improvement using GPL instead of hacking? Your version would require from me about two hours because I know a lot of this firmware internals already. As I wrote:

Moreover, I am sure that it is possible to flash XR500 firmware to R7800 after some processing.

(To avoid misunderstanding: I'll not do that, because NG would be so angry IMO . )

But it is much more interesting to get real improvements and optimization using own investigation and brainstorming but not results of others. De facto people like or dislike not your results but RMerlin's or NG's or even my

Voxel.

 

[e38BimmerFN]

Some tests we can run for comparison would be iPerf and or duckwares test tool and see if there is any performance issues seen while using the Duma OS.

I'll see if I can find sometime this weekend and run some tests.

Also good testing is setting up a shared out PC Gb wired on the LAN side and do some wired and wireless file xfer speed testing, Read and Write back and forth with just explorer and some large files. Gets you a real world test review of what wireless and wired speeds do when coping files back and forth.


This is good:

Xvortex, is there any performance loss using the Duma OS on the R7800?

 

[XVortex]

I respect the work of programmers since I am a programmer too (mainly in embedded devices). routers are a hobby and I'm aiming to get a quick result and use them for main purpose or get fun. each router software is far from perfect and sometimes it's better not even to know what's under the hood. I'm glad that there are people who make em better. nevertheless, if there are any interesting tasks - I always open to brainstorm it together.

 

[e38BimmerFN]

Most willing to help you out as well if needed. Think this XR would be a good project and fun like the rest.

I respect the work of programmers since I am a programmer too (mainly in embedded devices). routers are a hobby and I'm aiming to get a quick result and use them for main purpose or get fun. each router software is far from perfect and sometimes it's better not even to know what's under the hood. I'm glad that there are people who make em better. nevertheless, if there are any interesting tasks - I always open to brainstorm it together.

 

[microchip]

I respect the work of programmers since I am a programmer too (mainly in embedded devices). routers are a hobby and I'm aiming to get a quick result and use them for main purpose or get fun. each router software is far from perfect and sometimes it's better not even to know what's under the hood. I'm glad that there are people who make em better. nevertheless, if there are any interesting tasks - I always open to brainstorm it together.

Really? Did you post your changes of XWRT already or are you still ripping off RMerlin's work and violate licenses?

If you did post it, link please

 

[kamoj]

I really think this is out-of-scope for this thread. This thread is about XR500 experiences.
Maybe you can start another thread or send private messages, please.

 

[Voxel]

I really think this is out-of-scope for this thread. This thread is about XR500 experiences.
Maybe you can start another thread or send private messages, please.

One more remark. OK?

I respect the work of programmers since I am a programmer too (mainly in embedded devices). routers are a hobby and I'm aiming to get a quick result and use them for main purpose or get fun. each router software is far from perfect and sometimes it's better not even to know what's under the hood. I'm glad that there are people who make em better. nevertheless, if there are any interesting tasks - I always open to brainstorm it together.

Not quite so. My hobby (my builds are my hobby) leads I believe to progress and improvements of the stock firmware and third party firmware, increasing the sales of NG. Your hobby and fun is against your colleagues’ work and against of owners of routers at the end of all. It leads to regression.

First, if you are using my binaries extracted from my firmware in your “quick version” it means that I have to close my project for R7800 and to find other hobby. Really, what for I have to continue if my builds are not used but people prefer such “quick version”. I spend a lot of time for any of my version, it is really hard work, but people would prefer your 2-hours “quick version”. No any sense for me to continue. Regression.

Second. The single advantage of XR500 is DumaOS. No sense to buy this XR500 router if you are planning to use third-party firmware because of R7800 is the same hardware and cheaper. But also no sense to by XR500 if you can use the same OS on cheaper R7800. NG obviously made some investment to DumaOS and they expect to get the profits. But if people stop to buy more expensive XR500 then this DumaOS project is business failure for NG. Thus, not more investments to future improvements, additional development, but lazy support of existent consumers and finally EOL for XR500. Lack of profits,. DumaOS programmers are left w/o contract with NG because lack of perspective and sales. Regression.

Third. Instead of future improvements of firmware the manufacturers have to spend efforts of programmers for protection of their firmware against such “quick version”. Closing their source codes and what means additional troubles for such developers as e.g. RMerlin. And me too. NG is not friendly to even my builds (here I do not understand them), but now much more packages will be removed from their GPL to avoid such “quick versions”.

Tactically your “quick version” is temporary attractive for owners of routers. Strategically you spoil the work/hobby of your colleagues/programmers and close perspective of future improvements/development in this DumaOS. Your fun strategically leads to nothing. No Voxel’s build, no future development for XR500, etc.

Voxel.

 

[XVortex]

Well, just one remark and stop the offtopic.
Voxel, your participation in the project depends on how much you actually interesting in it. What you want to get: new experience, fame, donations, free samples, job in a netgear, or that your tweaks are licensed as netduma’s work.
If you want to be a part of real GPL project, join the OpenWRT. Otherwise, all this is digging into third-party semi-proprietary incomplete source code is similar to hack. Me and You - just in different ways and amounts...

 

[jsmiddleton4]

See how it works. Just one more leads to just one more leads to just one more. Get a room. Whatever anyone thinks of someone else doesn't belong in this thread.

 

[jsmiddleton4]

When it comes to how our routers look on the "inside", their firmware, who cares how pretty they look? I want the functions to function and the setup to flow in a sensical way. I don't live in my router. My router once setup is invisible. Its firmware can be flipping me off all day long and I don't care one iota.

Who cares that Netgears looks out dated? What it looks like is irrelevant.

Make it work as advertised, as best it can for all features and make it so its reasonably intuitive to set up.

We don't need layers of this or that OS to reach that goal. We just need a design team with common sense.

 

[Killhippie]

When it comes to how our routers look on the "inside", their firmware, who cares how pretty they look? I want the functions to function and the setup to flow in a sensical way. I don't live in my router. My router once setup is invisible. Its firmware can be flipping me off all day long and I don't care one iota.

Who cares that Netgears looks out dated? What it looks like is irrelevant.

Make it work as advertised, as best it can for all features and make it so its reasonably intuitive to set up.

We don't need layers of this or that OS to reach that goal. We just need a design team with common sense.

It depends on what you use your network for. DumaOS has a good QoS works well with for my gaming and the GUI matters as I want to see what’s going on I’m a hobbiest and a gamer but we all want different things if I was not a gamer the R7800 would be great with voxels firmware, but netgears interface does need updating and alas a lot of it does not work as advertised because updates bring in more bugs.

Voxels firmware makes the R7800 much better. Netduma have made a great setup for gamers and those that like to fine tune. Negears interface as it is now is not Intuitive and DunaOS is better but still needs work, which they are doing. Quick dirty hacks ruin things for all though as Voxel said, everyone looses out and the dedicated guys looking to improve firmware like Voxel and small teams like Netduma won’t be able to improve things or bring in new ideas because some people just steal others work sadly.

 

[rbird2]

I think the real problem is Netgear and their piss poor firmware.

Most of us are sick and tired of the problems that never get fixed and the extremely long length of time it takes for Netgear to finally acknowledge a problem and fix it.

Netgear makes good hardware but their firmware just plain sucks. Also, the Netgear Genie interface (R7800) looks like it is 20 years old and was programmed for an old MSDOS environment. The interest in the DumaOS on the R7800 was a hope for a firmware that looks good on the R7800 and fixes ongoing problems with things like QOS that has never worked correctly from day one on the R7800.

However this also is just a pipe dream for us R7800 owners since when you read the Netgear xr500 forum you see Netgear released their flagship xr500 router with Readyshare support missing. Again, a major feature is broken and customers have to wait for the updated firmware to fix this missing feature.

It is obvious that Netgear did not perform very much testing before releasing the xr500 DumaOS firmware. If I was a xr500 customer spending that much of my hard earned money only to find a major feature broken, I would be really pissed.

I for one am very thankful that Voxel spends his precious time fixing Netgear firmware for us. If Voxel firmware was not available for my R7800 I would be probably be forced to use DD-WRT or LEDE (both work but do not handle Samba Networking with a eSATA drive).

Thank you Voxel, your your efforts are greatly appreciated by all R7800 owners!

 

[avtella]

For Netgear/users I think Voxel is a gem fixing/updating things that should have been taken care of by the company by now.

I was enthusiastic as it seemed NG was listening to testers with new UI, wanted features like VPN client and fixing old bugs but now it seems things are getting worse and half hazardly done stuff like the new VPN client which only supports one company, then you have the perpetually beta downloader which ironically is available on the R7000 but not the R8500. Lack of consistency of the UI across models as well especially the Attached Devices section, to the point where setting stuff on the Genie App shows different icons on the actual router UI.

Even simple things like changing SSIDs causes both the WiFi band to be restarted and takes a while on NG models while my CenturyLink provided Techncolor C2100T AC modem/router (Broadcom based) does such changes very quickly and only the changed band is offline and for a much shorter period. It also has more granular Firewall settings.

The R9000 for example didn’t have QoS for a very long time and HT160 still doesn’t work unless you use a certain workaround via chrome to enable it though that workaround is not officially supported.

They have the VPN certificate expiry (April) issue now, and they probably won’t release updates till the last moment to the annoyance of many.

I also understand they gimp some options to reduce support calls, as more thing that can be changed means more things to go wrong, but compared to Asus it’s way too bare for what you pay at the moment. At least Netgear still has its hardware quality going for it but with Qualcomm and Broadcom becoming less conducive to Open Source than before, stock software matters more these days. I mean newer Broadcom based routers don’t even have proper WiFi support if at all on OpenWRT for example.

 

[Voxel]

Well, just one remark and stop the offtopic.
Voxel, your participation in the project depends on how much you actually interesting in it. What you want to get: new experience, fame, donations, free samples, job in a netgear, or that your tweaks are licensed as netduma’s work.
If you want to be a part of real GPL project, join the OpenWRT. Otherwise, all this is digging into third-party semi-proprietary incomplete source code is similar to hack. Me and You - just in different ways and amounts...

Well, I started with this after I bought two R7500v1. I am professional as you can guess. My area is not embedded devices, but rather powerful graphics workstations and clusters. I started with my real job using SGI (IRIX) when there were no Linux or Windows yet. So Linux is known platform for me. Why I started: because of dissatisfaction of R7500 performance, limited functionality (e.g. broken support of ext2/3/4) and quality of programming. And there were no any alternative for my R7500: no OpenWRT/DD-WRT or whatever else with working 5GHz band. So I have to either shelve my routers or to do something myself. And my builds had success when I shared my results. So I continued with R7800 when my broken R7500 was replaced by NG by this router. I tried other WRT but at least that time my own build were more fast and stable. So it is why I started. Also I feel that I have to support my users. It is why I continue.

Donation: no. Not so much. It is enough only for hosting and maybe to buy one router.

Tweaks. It is not tweaks. It is what I’d expect from the stock firmware. Tweaks are just tweaks. They do not touch OS internals. But there is almost total replacement of internals of the stock firmware leaving its single advantage i.e. hardware acceleration.

Job in NG. Well. Maybe. Not change of my current workplace, but something like additional to my current job. Why not?

So it is rather my fun and hobby plus responsibility to take care for users of my build.

Hacking. If I use GPL downloaded from NG site, if I compile it “as it” it is not hacking. When I change packages publishing my changes it is not hacking. I am able to hack something including XR7500 FW. But it is not interesting for me. It is the business of teenagers.


Voxel.

 

[thiggins]

XVortex and Voxel: Time to stop the OT.
Let's bring the thread back to discussion of the thread topic: Experiences with the XR500, not alternative versions of it or the R7800.

Please start another thread if you want to discuss that, assuming that any such firmware:

• complies with GPL
• doesn't include controls to bypass region or transmit power limits
• does not bypass or defeat any NETGEAR controls to prevent loading of alternative firmware

 

[e38BimmerFN]

Correction,
Ready Share support is supported and working on the XR500 router. Also working on the (X)R7800, minus the eSATA support which isn't supported on the XR500 HW. Maybe Vortex can make this work.

Will start a new thread. I'm out.

I think the real problem is Netgear and their piss poor firmware.

Most of us are sick and tired of the problems that never get fixed and the extremely long length of time it takes for Netgear to finally acknowledge a problem and fix it.

Netgear makes good hardware but their firmware just plain sucks. Also, the Netgear Genie interface (R7800) looks like it is 20 years old and was programmed for an old MSDOS environment. The interest in the DumaOS on the R7800 was a hope for a firmware that looks good on the R7800 and fixes ongoing problems with things like QOS that has never worked correctly from day one on the R7800.

However this also is just a pipe dream for us R7800 owners since when you read the Netgear xr500 forum you see Netgear released their flagship xr500 router with Readyshare support missing. Again, a major feature is broken and customers have to wait for the updated firmware to fix this missing feature.

It is obvious that Netgear did not perform very much testing before releasing the xr500 DumaOS firmware. If I was a xr500 customer spending that much of my hard earned money only to find a major feature broken, I would be really pissed.

I for one am very thankful that Voxel spends his precious time fixing Netgear firmware for us. If Voxel firmware was not available for my R7800 I would be probably be forced to use DD-WRT or LEDE (both work but do not handle Samba Networking with a eSATA drive).

Thank you Voxel, your your efforts are greatly appreciated by all R7800 owners!