Tomato on R7000 vs Merlin on RT-AC68U for Stability, Performance, OpenVPN Server

[Avery]

I'm looking to upgrade my home router, so that I can have remote access via VPN to an ESXi lab I'm setting up.

I've boiled it down to:
Netgear R7000 w/ Tomato for OpenVPN Server
ASUS RT-AC68U /w WRT-Merlin (or alternatively Tomato) for OpenVPN Server

My priorities are:
- Must have Secure VPN Option from Mobile and other remote devices (I understand OpenVPN is a good solution)
- Must be stable... stability is more important to me than endless features (hence why I'm thinking DD-WRT is not my best option)
- Ideally, high performing for wireless
- Ideally, good USB networked drive performance
- Flexibility to go Stock, DD-WRT, or Tomato in the future (think both meet this need)

I've reviewed the SNB article comparing performance of these two routers, and understands the R7000 wins slightly for network, and significantly for USB performance.

What fits my needs best? It's unclear to me what will happen to the R7000's performance if I flash it with Tomato. I assume performance remains about the same for the RT-AC68U w/ WRT-Merlin... anyone know?

Thanks for your insight.

 

[RogerSC]

I'm using an R7000 as we speak with the latest official Netgear stock firmware. Tomato for ARM still has a ways to go. From my use of it, I'd have to consider it an Alpha product (not functionally complete yet, there are unimplemented parts of the tomato interface), even though it is discussed as Beta. This is true for both the RT-AC68U and R7000, both ARM-based routers. I'm not using tomato at the moment because there is a particularly annoying problem where it can take an hour after flashing or rebooting the router to get the ping time to the router (which adds to the ping time anywhere) to stabilize. This is done by repeatedly rebooting the router, which I've gotten very tired of doing.

So, for me, at the moment it would either be dd-wrt or stock firmware for the R7000, or RMerlin (or maybe dd-wrt, don't know what state that's in since for the Asus since I don't have one) for the RT-AC68U. I don't really trust stock Asus firmware from previous experience with an RT-N66U where I only felt comfortable with RMerlin's bug fixed and enhanced firmware versions. There were always problems with the Asus firmware, they would fix a bug and introduce a few more in the process. Made RMerlin's firmware very popular, but made me not want to use Asus stock firmware.

If I was buying a router at the moment based on firmware, it would be a tough choice...I believe that hardware-wise, the better choice is the R7000, and when and if tomato for ARM is in better shape, that would be great. Like I said, I'm using the stock firmware on the R7000, and it is perfectly stable for me. I'm not in love with the Netgear stock firmware admin web interface, so I try not to spend much time using the interface. But the firmware and router is reliable, and it has great wireless performance. I've used dd-wrt on the R7000 quite a lot, but the person who was testing and releasing dd-wrt for the R7000 (Kong) is no longer doing that. The person that's doing that now has quite a wide focus, is building firmware for a lot of models, so users are now doing the detailed and performance testing. There doesn't seem to be a great feedback loop at the moment between problems with new dd-wrt releases and the person who fixes things. However, Kong's releases are still available, and work really well with the R7000.

Again, I'm not sure of the dd-wrt situation for the RT-AC68U. I think that Kong was also releasing firmware for that model and isn't any more. So I don't know if the new dd-wrt releases for the RT-AC68U are in the same shape as those for the R7000, but I suspect so.

Anyways, I think that either one of these wireless routers would do what you want to do. As you say, the USB 3.0 performance on the R7000 hardware is better than that for the RT-AC68U, so if that's important to you, that's a consideration. But you can either look at it as a difficult choice, or just follow your own preferences after reading reviews. You can usually "buy and try" if you are careful to be sure that where you're buying allows returns (not eBay, for example *smile*). So I would just read what I can, make my best choice, and then make sure that the router that you chose fits your specific needs.