I got bored last night and started researching OpenWRT. There is no particular feature that it supports, that my current router firmware doesn’t, but I haven’t looked into the project in at least 10 years.
I currently run an ASUS AX-3000, which I bought because I thought my old Netgear X8 R8300 was malfunctioning, but when I had the same issue with the ASUS, I found it was a config problem. Since the Netgear is just sitting in the basement, I though I’d install OpenWRT on that first and then see if it’s worth it to install on the ASUS. The Netgear is a little more high end of a router, but it doesn’t have WiFi 6. The ASUS does, but has one less radio, so I’ll need to see how they perform.
Unfortunately, neither router has images prebuilt for it, so I had to build my own image. Luckily there was already a profile for an R8500, which hardware wise is almost identical to the model I have.
The build environment setup and instructions can be found here. It was a simple matter of firing up a Ubuntu VM and following along. I can’t flash it while I’m at work, so that will have to wait.
The most annoying thing with getting this setup is how confusing the OpenWRT documentation is. I can see why they would organize it this way. It seems to me that unless you have a router that one of the maintainers owns, you are left with manual. Even though it’s just linux, so you really just need the hardware support to get up and running. I would think a more broad generic image to test things would make more sense. Oh well.
cweb@testvmhost:~/openwrt-imagebuilder-bcm53xx-generic.Linux-x86_64$ make image \
PROFILE="netgear_r8500"
Generate local signing keys...
WARNING: can't open config file: /builder/shared-workdir/build/staging_dir/host/etc/ssl/openssl.cnf
WARNING: can't open config file: /builder/shared-workdir/build/staging_dir/host/etc/ssl/openssl.cnf
read EC key
writing EC key
Checking 'true'... ok.
Checking 'false'... ok.
Checking 'working-make'... ok.
Checking 'case-sensitive-fs'... ok.
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