r7800 and open source

[jim trudel]

Hi,

I just bought a new router and I would like to try an open source, I know R7800 can take dd wrt and open wrt. Ive made some research and I see that dd wrt firmware is well maintained, since 3 months, about 10 new builds, some fixes, patches etc.... The web interface seems to be great.

about open wrt, I saw that the firmware seems to be a bit more complex and the GUI maybe a bit less modern.. I have about 12 devices on my network, I use open vpn and in the next month, I will use wireguard probably.

advices about that, Im looking for some stability, speed etc...

thanks

 

[Trip]

Last I left DD-WRT (maybe 6-7 years ago), it was in a rather fragmented state, with various mixes of Brainslayer, Kong and other builds referred to as "the best" for a particular model, and within those trains, different sub-versions breaking this and/or fixing that between each release. Super frustrating. I found then, and still find today, their website and forums to be a confusing mix of how to find (or not find) which sub-builds are best, or even available, for a particular model, so they definitely could improve on that piece as well. I also know Kong has since moved on to OpenWRT, whose development model in my opinion is much more sustainable, and has been largely solid, especially for Qualcomm and x86 hardware, for years.

The R7800 is arguably the best Qualcomm-based all-in-one, so I would lean towards OpenWRT most definitely. They are also making pretty decent strides with software flow offloading, which allows routing certain functionality via the CPU at speeds almost approaching actual hardware acceleration and/or unbound CPU setups (x86) -- a very encouraging direction for them, indeed.

Hope that helps!

 

[jim trudel]

Last I left DD-WRT (maybe 6-7 years ago), it was in a rather fragmented state, with various mixes of Brainslayer, Kong and other builds referred to as "the best" for a particular model, and within those trains, different sub-versions breaking this and/or fixing that between each release. Super frustrating. I found then, and still find today, their website and forums to be a confusing mix of how to find (or not find) which sub-builds are best, or even available, for a particular model, so they definitely could improve on that piece as well. I also know Kong has since moved on to OpenWRT, whose development model in my opinion is much more sustainable, and has been largely solid, especially for Qualcomm and x86 hardware, for years.

The R7800 is arguably the best Qualcomm-based all-in-one, so I would lean towards OpenWRT most definitely. They are also making pretty decent strides with software flow offloading, which allows the firmware to route packets via the CPU for certain functions at speeds almost approaching actual hardware acceleration and/or architectures with much higher CPU-bound limits (x86).

Hope that helps!

Thank you very much.
But the only thing is open wrt VPN setup seems much more complicated vs dd wrt....
?

Envoyé de mon SM-G960W en utilisant Tapatalk

 

[Trip]

OpenWRT has mad a lot of strides making a good amount of config available in the GUI (LuCi), even for add-on packages, such as OpenVPN. Per this example guide from OVPN, you can see it is possible, and IMHO not all that daunting. I'm sure something very similar is possible for IPSEC as well.

 

[ACwifiguy]

I migrated from DD-WRT to OpenWRT. Bigger community and a greater diversity of developers all helping each other. The r7800 is very popular. I have three R7800s running hynman’s latest master 5.4 build- has all the features you are looking for. Hynman’s builds are an easy way to get in to OpenWRT and come prepackaged with a wide diversity of popular features. Installing his 5.4 build is as easy as hooking up a wired computer and flashing the file ending in factory.img.

Main Dropbox (he drops new builds every couple days, date is on the build file):
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ew0gap0crn30wyk/AADQLCBF5All8wc8RXmxisqAa?lst=

Here is his thread describing all the build features:
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/build-for-netgear-r7800/316

 

[Val D.]

Last I left DD-WRT (maybe 6-7 years ago), it was in a rather fragmented state, with various mixes of Brainslayer, Kong and other builds referred to as "the best" for a particular model, and within those trains, different sub-versions breaking this and/or fixing that between each release. Super frustrating. I found then, and still find today, their website and forums to be a confusing mix of how to find (or not find) which sub-builds are best, or even available, for a particular model, so they definitely could improve on that piece as well.

Pretty accurate description of my own DD-WRT experience and a good explanation of the reasons why I also lost interest in this project years ago. I remember fighting with my last DD-WRT router somewhere in 2014 and it was a very tedious process of downloading 3-4 different automatically generated weekly builds and testing to find which one is less broken.

 

[jim trudel]

I migrated from DD-WRT to OpenWRT. Bigger community and a greater diversity of developers all helping each other. The r7800 is very popular. I have three R7800s running hynman’s latest master 5.4 build- has all the features you are looking for. Hynman’s builds are an easy way to get in to OpenWRT and come prepackaged with a wide diversity of popular features. Installing his 5.4 build is as easy as hooking up a wired computer and flashing the file ending in factory.img.

Main Dropbox (he drops new builds every couple days, date is on the build file):
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ew0gap0crn30wyk/AADQLCBF5All8wc8RXmxisqAa?lst=

Here is his thread describing all the build features:
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/build-for-netgear-r7800/316

Great.
Thank you very much

Envoyé de mon SM-G960W en utilisant Tapatalk

 

[coxhaus]

If you do run OpenWRT then you need to track securities issues so you can stay up to date.

https://openwrt.org/advisory/start

I am not trying to scare you away. At least you know. I am not sure you know with consumer gear.

 

[jim trudel]

If you do run OpenWRT then you need to track securities issues so you can stay up to date.

https://openwrt.org/advisory/start

I am not trying to scare you away. At least you know. I am not sure you know with consumer gear.

Third party are really more secure than oem firmware.
And netgear does not have a good reputation about that

Envoyé de mon SM-G960W en utilisant Tapatalk

 

[microchip]

Third party are really more secure than oem firmware.
And netgear does not have a good reputation about that

Envoyé de mon SM-G960W en utilisant Tapatalk

That's not entirely correct. In alsmost every firmware release, no matter the model, NETGEAR mentions fixing of security issues. It can take some time for a new release to appear, but in the ChangeLog, there's a 98% chance some security issue has been mentioned to be fixed. They virtually never say what exactly is fixed, just "fixed security issue(s)"