I have many nerdy friends who have been Linux users for ages. But most of them don’t know such a thing as Openwrt exists or have never bothered to give it a try. It’s a very fun piece of software to play with and can be extremely useful for routing traffic. Wondering why it isn’t more popular/widely used.

  • haui
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    58 months ago

    Interesting. I have heard of it but so far I didnt bother since my router is quite versatile.

    My biggest fear is that it borks itself and I sit there at 10 pm on movie night without a network or internet to troubleshoot.

    If if I chose to use it I would need to have the current router as a fallback either running 24/7 or on a dead man switch.

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)
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      48 months ago

      Some routers have dual partition setup.

      Active and backup. When flashing firmware, it is flashed to the backup partition. If the router boots successfully, the newly flashed backup partition becomes active and vice versa. If things screw up, nothing happens.

      • haui
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        28 months ago

        Thanks for the info. Thats not exactly what I meant. I‘m not afraid of the router itself breaking at installation but freezing for example and not being able to reboot. I usually dont tinker with mission critical stuff.

        • Possibly linux
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          18 months ago

          I know you likely have moved on but it would be interesting to actually figure out the cause. What steps would someone need to take to reproduce the issue?

    • @TCB13
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      18 months ago

      My biggest fear is that it borks itself and I sit there at 10 pm on movie night without a network or internet to troubleshoot.

      If you pick decent hardware eg. Netgear R7800 you won’t have issues. I’ve units of those running OpenWrt at home and a few small offices running for years with a lot of clients and traffic and they’re rock solid.

    • mFatOP
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      18 months ago

      That’s exactly what I do. You can keep your ISP router and hook up your openwrt router to one of its lan ports and have two wifi networks.