I am looking for a router, and OpenWRT came up. I was looking at their table of hardware and the ASUS RT-AC3100 seemed like a good option, as its cheap used, (~$40 USD) and supported by the latest OpenWRT version.
Thing is, its EOL, per Asus. Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?
Is there a way to see or estimate when a router will no longer work on OpenWRT?
Check out GL.iNet products. They’re all based on OpenWrt with a more beginner-friendly GUI on top. (LuCi can be installed via a few clicks.) And very affordable. Some can be flashed to vanilla OpenWrt as well.
This. I looked at a bunch of options and these are the best for OpenWrt and are very reasonably priced. Mine did torrenting, VPN, and a few other small services before I got my proper served up and running and now it is less loaded and more relaxed without that workload. Absolutely awesome, very high quality for low price, and it comes with a very slightly modified OpenWrt firmware which is unlocked by default.
As an alternative to openwrt rather than getting consumer based hardware and flashing. Take a look at mikrotik I’ve been running a $40 wired router for years and it has tons of advanced features that are commercial grade.
I used OpenWRT and Tomato and a bunch of other forks. I settled on pfsense on a mini PC x86 box because of the community support and great YouTube tutorials.
Hardware routers can be killed for many reasons. Age and an inability to upgrade them to suit current needs is the biggest one. OEM’s do this fairly quickly as they build devices with the resources to work for today and maybe tomorrow. After their product is no longer made they want it to be obsolete not long after so they can claim they can support is no longer viable. Then you but another router and they make money.
OpenWRT tries to augment and support devices for as long as possible but at the same time the hardware limitations still exist and often the storage will no longer support the latest version due to the size of the new version.
As far as when that will happen depends on multiple factors that have the ability to change at any time. There viable be a massive flaw in a portion of the software that requires a huge rewrite and the addition of code that will make the software too large to fit.
Sometimes someone will create a version with less used features available so that it can still be used but it’s a losing battle
If you want true longevity repurpose an old computer into a router. OpnSense is what I use and recommend. Add in something like a TP-Link EAP650 or two and you have a rock solid platform that can handle a lot more and last much longer. Add Power Over Ethernet (POE) along with an Omada controller and you can position the AP in a place where it will work the best for your use. You can have enough access points to have a full signal anywhere even if your place is the size of the Louvre. When new technology comes out you can upgrade the AP’s as needed when needed and upgrade the router as well in a similar fashion.
Maybe the OpenWRT One?
I’ve considered this but only 1 Ethernet port requires a switch, so I’m not really sure
Unmanaged switches are cheap and useful. Managed are better but not everyone has the need for them
In the past the issue has been limited storage for newer versions and possibly ram. It should list those specs on the open wrt site.
One vote for mini pc router with poe wifi ap. When I first set it up I had a tp omada wifi 5 and switched to a yuncore/kuwfi wifi 6 ap flashed with openwrt and I didn’t even have to touch the router config, although I did so the new ap would get the same ip as the old one.
As a path to ease in I was also considering keeping whichever of my older tomato and openwrt routers was more powerful processor wise with the wifi off and using the standalone APs as an upgrade to wifi5/6, but the used pc with 2.5gbe and 10gbit sfp+ came into my possession cheaply so I went for it.
PC router has opnsense though. I haven’t tested x86 openwrt. I also got it cheap because the sfp nic didn’t work, warning of checksum error but I fixed that using intel eeupdate (have to pirate/have nda breaker friend) on a portable windows 10 install.
