My family needs a new router to replace the old (though not old enough that it should be dying) netgear router that is slowly dying. I want to do something with good foss firmware like opnsense or openwrt. I was thinking that the BananaPi options look good, but had some concerns. I would like to install the firmware myself, rather than trust that the manufacturer didn’t modify it in any way. I don’t know if the pre-made openwrt bananapi routers can be flashed with custom firmware easily. Also I need something with wifi (ideally wifi 6 or better), though would be willing to consider a separate WAP. VLANs would be nice too, but I could live without them. Have any of you done this? What has your experience been, both with install and long term? Is there anything I should look out for that I might not think of? What resources can I use to find out more about this?
Edit: This is the one I’m looking at. Sorry for linking to Amazon but I used FF’s remove tracking from URL feature. https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-BPI-R3-Development-MediaTek-Support/dp/B0BLVF9697/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
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I’ve got an R3 at home which generally works well. Flashing mainline OpenWRT was pretty smooth and easy. It’s been a while since I did the bring up, but I do remember having to jump through some hoops to get a partition layout that would utilize the onboard storage properly. By default it only left 10mb to install additional packages which seemed to defeat the purpose of having all of that emmc available. That may have changed in the more recent releases.
One bug I encounter regularly is that some (maybe older?) Apple devices seem to be able to lock up the router. Adding watchcat can get the thing rebooted in less than a minute in the event that it does hang, which makes it barely noticeable, but it’s not an ideal fix.
Depending on the devices you have in your house that might be a showstopper or of no consequence at all. Otherwise WiFi speeds and signal are great, as are general performance and reliability except for that bug I mentioned. Haven’t used VLANs but it’s all there and the flexibility of OpenWRT is great.
Did you have to use a display to flash? Some of them don’t seem to have a display output and I don’t know if that will be an issue. The apple thing concerns me. There are a few macs and iPhones on the network, but the macs are m1, and the oldest iphone would be a 12. Do you think that would be an issue? Also, which R3 router are you using specifically?
UART to USB adapter, use a terminal multiplexer on your laptop