Thanks for covering OpenWrt. It's an amazing piece of tech that doesn't get the credit it deserves. I've fallen so in love with it that I got involved in the community and made my own builds for undocumented ISP routers.

The easiest approach to test out OpenWRT is generally to have a different router available just in case your experiment goes awry. A cheap router that performs basic functions can be had for less than $30. Think of it as an emergency failback for that one time your ideas didn't pan out. If you don't, be sure to at least know how to hook your smart phone up to your computer and use it that way- before you start. The more you experiment, the more likely you'll need a failback. Word of advice: LUCI ( the interface used by OpenWRT ) is set so that if you lose connectivity when making changes, just wait 90 seconds and it should revert back... Don't panic and reset the box or pull the power plug.. WAIT.

Cannot recommend OpenWRT enough. I bought a number of Meraki routers at a city auction a few years ago for like $5 each. If I wanted to use the built-in Cisco firmware I would have had to pay a yearly license fee. Thanks to OpenWRT I was able to flash them (needed a UART) and actually use them in my and other family members' homes. Also was pretty straightforward to setup WireGuard between them so we could share a Jellyfin server. Could not recommend enough.

Great coverage on OpenWRT! I've had nothing but a great experience running it on a cheap TP-Link Archer A7, and it is a dream compared to the other junk firmware that comes with consumer routers. Also, the front-end (LuCI) is incredible! It's relatively easy to install as well, I would highly suggest anyone with a spare router should absolutely install this and give it a shot! It's my main router right now and no problems in the slightest. It's the only software that's ever inspired me to join their community forum and try to contribute! Crazy.

*Note:* This video doesn't show the full steps. If you see the message indicating that you're in initramfs mode, this means your changes will be undone after a reboot. To finish the installation, you need to flash your router from OpenWrt upgrade interface, after which it'll be a persistent install. On some routers, you'll be able to just flash it from the stock firmware upgrade interface right away.

Impeccable timing, literally earlier today I brought up OpenWRT in my workplace, we ended up flashing a small stack of decommissioned and discontinued APs with it. I got off my shift from doing that an hour and a half ago, that makes it roughly thirty minutes after I got off work you talk about the very thing I've been messing with for the day.

The latest firmware kinda bit me earlier this year. The firmware I had from TP-Link was dropping connection every hour or so. I found OpenWRT, flashed my router, and it has been stable since then. I had to buy a second hotspot for 2.4 ghz because the routers 2.4 ghz chip is closed source... So that was less than ideal. But I still didn't have to buy a whole new router. I'm super impressed with OpenWRT so far.

It's most awesome that you showed the entire flashing process in realtime, without which, I expect some folk might be inclined to pull the plug (obviously not good), thinking something is wrong.

You are my favorite black man

Good stuff. I love OpenWRT. DD-WRT too I guess. Like you said about those missing binary blobs though, it can really hurt the device. I had one device that went from full gigabit line routing speed to 20-30 megabits because it lost hardware acceleration. I think it's probably a lot better on more modern processors that have enough horsepower to push the data without needing hardware acceleration.

I'm glad you made this because it's encouraging me to finally get around to it. I'll happily spend entirely too much time diving into pretty much anything except networking and printers but my frustration with this industry has reached critical mass. My area will have access to fiber soon and the thought of having uncapped upload speeds up to 2 gigabit makes me as excited as when my parents upgraded from dial-up back in the day. The upgraded NAS project I've been putting off is finally at the top of the list.

Been using OpenWRT for years and couldn't be happier

Amazing deepfake as always, Luke.

This video couldnt come at a more perfect time. I'm just moving and thinking of getting my own hardware for our home network setup.

I currently run Merlin on my v2 AC68-U's. I'm a big fan of that line of routers. I may look into going full Foss now, thanks! PS: It was nice to hear those tracker tunes! It was like I was there running a Vitality key gen back in the day!

I remember being dependant on my isp provided router. My port forwards would occasionally go missing. Turned out the isp pushed firmware. Wouldn't be surprised if basically all store bought routers have access for alphabet boys built in

Jayson Tatum knows about wireless routers and how to route an untalented team in the NBA. Thanks for another great video!

Congratulations... I did the openwrt migration last year on 5 boxes. 1. box is the main router for the internal networks and control of outgoing load balancing and failover. This router controls outgoing load balancing (edgerouter 2 & 3 for 2 wireless internet connections - same provider) and failover (edgerouter 4 - for alternative internet connection via neighbors WiFi or my mobile phone) using Mwan3 software-module . Router 5 is a hardware reserve if edgerouter 2-4 burn down, as they are very cheap consumer boxes. Also the setup is configured for 2 ingoing VPNs (private and my company) and has currently 20 vlans and firewall administered security zones. The good thing is also that Wireshark can be used to remote traffik-analysis (via ssh) to inspect networking issues.

Been using openwrt for a suuuper long time, and used ddwrt back in the WRT54G days. It's also an awesome for making a software defined router in a VM and connecting all your VMs up to it if you want to test it out before flashing to your hardware, or need some sort of SDR for your use case (ie want to connect all your VMs to a VPN without having to do it on each one manually).

I'd say running an up-to-date firmware on your main, public facing, router is most important, so concider using OpenWRT on that, especially if the manufacturer stopped releasing updates. However, if you are using routers as access points, unless you don't trust the firmware the manufacturer provided, and/or are running those routers in a public setting (where many people might attempt to break into the router), you don't really need to install OpenWRT on them if the stock firmware does the job. I'm running OpenWRT on my main router (which I bought specifically because it was supported by OpenWRT), and 2 routers as access points at home (from those 2, 1 isn't supported, and the other has Broadcom)

Nice. I used OpenWRT it's really nice. It's also a little limited to what hardware is on your router. For instance I couldn't install many packages because after installing OpenWRT it already had taken 80% of space. In addition I had to install packages dependencies manually. If a package required other package I had to find the other one and install it, and if that other one required some other, then I had to install that too and so on.

The thumbnails should be universally recognised as contemporary art, they are superb hehe.

I just pulled an all nighter trying to switch my Archer C20 firmware with OpenWRT, holy cow, that was quite the challenge! In the end it was worth it, the sheer amount of settings it opened up for me is more than I bargained for! But it is a learning curve and careful not to brick your device... I was lucky mine had a workaround to fix it or I'd be in trouble! lol

I think a lot of people would've benefited from seeing Step 7 being done especially on a Linux box.

Love those tutorials, keep em comming!

Finally! I have been waiting for OpenWRT video

Make a FOSS app list for android / Windows. I have been watching your videos all week. Keep up the amazing job, man. Thank you!

That is the easy part! Now the hard part is making sense of the menu and of the wiki!

Would love a video on the GL-inet routers. The travel ones are cool and come with openWRT

I ended up getting a bricked router and flashed the firmware through a UART serial connection. Maybe UART would be a neat subject you could cover in a video or something? Generally because you can use it to access a lot of hardware and dump/flash firmware.

I use OpenWRT and installed in on my spare netbook with 2GB RAM. And man, this OS is amazing. I can install docker and make it a filesharing server, I can install OpenClash to make a pesudo tor network, I can install any linux apps basically. It's great, it only eats 100MB of RAM.

FINALLY .. someone talks about his. As someone who has like 2 router and 3 soft router/ LAN managers I can say the router is where the buck stops. PI Hole IPtables UFW are always on deck. I have seen the the binaries for openwrt for alot of the orange pis and larger nano pis. I have tried openwrt on the orange pi zero but never got the LUA configuration to actually work. Also yes the wifi support is terrible for the most part. Openwrt FTW.

Yes, but let us not forget, that the ISP will, most of the time, not let you run anything else than what is provided and most if the time it is up to the ISP to do that. I would love to run open source firmware on my router/s, which for a local network is fine, but the outside router (most of time the DHCP server) is still under the ISPs control.

Please make a video about all the cool stuff you can do on OpenWrt :)

Sounds great, I'll give it a try, thanx!!

I‘m always panicking a bit when I install OpenWRT because it always feels like something is going wrong and it’s killing your router. But once installed, it's just great. And it never killed one of my routers :)

I need to get around to reflashing OpenWRT to my Netgear XR500 again. The only reason I abandoned it was because when I was moving, I had to connect my router to a router downstairs, as I wanted my own access points and things to be connected via ethernet, and for some reason it just wouldn't work right. Being able to have a network wide adblocker is a nice thing.

good video kinda cool because i was looking for the old fresh tomato vid yesterday lol

OpenWrt and OpenSSH are the best opensource projects ever. Very cheap tp-link routers can be used for SSH tunneling after some RAM and FLASH storage upgrade, i will probably make a video about it in the future. OpenWrt router with enough flash and storage is basically a Linux development board 🙂

Truly the foss of all time, I can feel the foss fossing inside of me

I have a router with openwrt. Flashed it a while back "for fun" actually and because I believe the connection is better and more stable (I can bypass ue limits if I want to when it comes to signal strength) but tbh I've just flashed it and didn't touch on it ever since 😂 works great all the time, TP-LINK C6 if I remember correctly

using wrt for i while, awesome stuff

I use it on a raspberry pi 4. Using a cheap USB gigabit Ethernet adapter and it works great. It also easily handles cake QSM to defeat bufferbloat. I use the built in Ethernet for my network and the USB one to connect to my modem. I think it's good up to 800mbps. Any higher and id be looking for a non USB based connection by using a compute module and board with 2.5gb Ethernet.

I had home experience with two alternative router firmware: OpenWRT on a TP-Link router and RouterOS on a Mikrotik device. And in my opinion, OpenWRT is a messy toy that is somehow more broken than RouterOS. After doing an update, having to reset it because I locked myself out and then restoring the old configuration 1:1 it for some reason still refused to work. No one ever uses it in a professional environment for a good reason, not everything that's FOSS is gold. Meanwhile RouterOS, for all it's flaws, has an amazing amount of functionality, and Mikrotik constantly supports their oldest hardware with the newest version of their firmware, which can't be said about ISP routers or regular consumer routers like TP-Link. Hell, even Cisco or Ubiquiti doesn't offer this much long-term support! I honestly fell in love with what these devices can do and I wouldn't imagine buying any other home network hardware that isn't Mikrotik at this point.

Thanks for the content, please a video with the best modules to install from openwrt

Great video!

My Asus router was unstable and even unable to serve the UI on default fw. Changing to AsusWRT made everything better. Good luck to OpenWRT!

I have openwrt on my router. I had to find some fixes for WiFi antenna stuff related for my particular router and build an image from source. But upgrading the router to new version is much easier, only had to patch it with custom image for the first time

Personally I use pfSense over OpenWRT and here's why - all of my machines are GNU / Linux based, if there ever were a zero day in GNU / Linux I'd be screwed. To be clear - I'm not saying OpenWRT is better or worse then pfSense, but in the unlikely event that a zero day was found in Linux, preventing attackers from getting to my router would be paramount since all of my systems are GNU / Linux based and would be vulnerable. In the unlikely event of a zero day on FreeBSD then the default firewalls of all of my Linux systems would protect those systems and my router would be the only thing compromised. I could be paranoid but the zero trust security model is always a good way to go. I also built my own router out of a SuperMicro server chassis, I'm not a fan of the junk hardware you get for $100 when for $150 you can get a full on server.

doing god's work as always

I used to use DD-wrt to create bridges on cheap linksys routers in the early 2000's.

Your public facing router is the most important piece of equipment on a network. If it is not secure, no amount of security on the client side will make much difference. This is the problem I have with IPv6 which seems to want to force every client onto the public internet, instead of behind a NAT router.

absolutely love OpenWRT will never run a router again without it 👍

Hey I really like that you rock your own Merch. I would like to cop an oversized T . . .

OpenWrt is easily one of the best open source projects ever

Lil late to tge party but I'm learning how to set up an OpnSense router/server currently. It'd be cool to see some coverage on custom router boxes from you too!

I installed tor client gateway last month using openwrt as you sugested. I didn’t felt good and felt like i am under surveillance all the time. So i ditched it 😂

Dewie looks so good luke.

another nice guide

Yes more tutorials!!!!

oh, I have such a router too, I'm gonna try installing OpenWRT on it :D

I've run DD-WRT and OpenWRT on some consumer stuff, great project but moved to opnsense now a days.

OpenWRT is so great!

Need of the day 👍

my man got the duu on lets goo

The glowing one telling you what to install to your machine! Rebel, brothers! One day the technologies will fall! And also suggest you to use only one approach source of internet, that can be possible. Mental Outlaw, you won't trick us!

I'm a Asuswrt-Merlin enjoyer myself.

Hey, i wanted to try OpenWrt but i couldnt install it on my device, because i got no support for it. Can you make a video to show other alternatives and what to do if it is not supported?

I remember working on openwrt firmware based router back in 2017, my than ceo had asked me that, since openwrt is unix and freebsd based firmware so technically a kali linux(gui one) can also run a Linksys router. To which i had replied not yet please get back to me in 2077😂

Lmao I love your delivery.

yo love this content

Do an episode on the best 3-5 routers to use.. and also, wifi7 came out, so its a perfect timing.. especially, tis the season. Cheers 🤙

you should cover MPTCP next!

ROUTER: How the NSA slurps your traffic

Even though I've been passingly involved in computers since kindergarten (in my school in the boonies of VA in like 1993 I was in a "special class" where we did basic stuff with computers... I think it was basically to test out the idea of actually having computer classes) Anyways long story short I didn't own a computer until I was about 17. My next door neighbor is apparently rich asf and I was able to get a open wi-fi signal for several years when we first built our house. I then essentially done the research on what I needed to redistribute the signal throughout my house so I could use my computer anywhere... Instead of being relegated to approximately 1 square foot😅 I ended up making a repeater out of an old Linksys router by running ddwrt... I even built a highly directional Wi-Fi antenna out of an old satellite dish📡 Anywhos my internet worked great and for free for like 5 years. I am fairly certain the ISP or someone probably set up a new router for the neighbor... Of course my network that I now pay for has a clever ssid that is unusual enough that it doesn't sound like a government spook right off the bat however if they Google my ssid it will probably scare the pants off of somebody 😂😂

I can't find any DSL routers supported by open wrt or alternatives for sale where I live sadly

What music did you use in the video montage bit?

Have been using dd-wrt for years, much better than factory f/w

The Gargoyle variant is a great firmware as well.

I was just wondering if you'd done a video on this. I use OpenWRT but rather than flashing the firmware on some crappy big box brand router I run it on an OrangePi R1 Plus solely as a router, No wifi, no DNS, no DHCP that's all handled elsewhere by things like pihole for dns and dhcp and I used TP link poweline adaptors / range extenders for wifi. I also have a managed switch with a dedicated DMZ netowrk on it's own vlan for my Tor relay node so if anything spooky happened to that since it has a port open to the world it's isolated from everything else

This is me pretending to understand and implement everything I just heard. Thank you.

Would be good to note that you are running in initramfs, you haven't actually installed OpenWrt at this point. You need to then sysupgrade to actually complete the install.

Would you trust Ubiquiti enough to not switch to OpenWRT?

"Become a remote blackhat network administrator" hahah now that is some good comedy right there

asking for Europe shipping on based win day 10, really want that hoodie, love your content ❤

Also, it runs perfectly in a VM.

I was surprised my Verizon 5g Home Gateway+Router was open source. 😊

a VoIP phone i set up for my grandparents actually came with a GPLv3 pamphlet and resources to get the source code to the firmware... extremely weird seeing that in an actual consumer device!

My routers are not supported. They are the cheapest kind, but work well as eth to wifi bridge.

Awesome music.

I use dd-wrt because openwrt doesn't come with proprietary blobs required for the hardware that I have. Configuration is also MUCH easier on ddwrt.

Ive been thinking about developing a portable router. Have any of y'all built one? I can think of several really interesting/useful use cases

Lol i just recently looked into this. Nice.

Good info here, but do they offer a nonbinary firmware download option?

Hey thats my router in your thumbnail

did bro just say mossad? so based

I got OpenWRT running on my netgear router easy, even wifi works. Not sure if my config is wrong or not but my older laptop and raspberry pi wont connect to it, but my 'modern' desktop and phone do fine

Been using a Pi4b as a router for a while now with OpenWRT.

Idk if you guys can help, but I bought a modem that is also a wireless AP that’s also a router that’s also a switch, and I was trying to flash it to throw FOSS on it, and I found that ISPs lock down MY OWN equipment so I can’t update my own firmware on it. Is there anyway I can flash it or spoof a firmware update to have it look like my isp is pushing it

Unfortunately, OpenWrt doesn’t work on Apple Airport Extreme yet. I have an old one of those that I want to repurpose as a switch and for now I just need to use the stock firmware and software (I think the OS is NetBSD). It’s probably OK since I’ll have the antennas disabled and the device will be behind a firewall, but still a bummer. I wanted an excuse to get into OpenWrt without obtaining more hardware, and configuring a simple switch seemed like a low-risk introduction.