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.

  • nixx@lemmy.ca
    1·
    2 years ago

    About a million years ago, back in 2007/2008 that is, there was this small company called Hexago that did R&D in IPv6 networking, they were behind the Frenet6 project and created the networking stack and the TSP client that would let you tunnel a /56 IPv6 network over a dynamic IPv4 connection.

    One the projects was a tiny hardware router, I honestly forget who made it, but Hexago would buy them, then we would flash each one with WRT+TSP client custom image, the idea was you plug this in your network and you have IPv6 connection in your network without doing any magic configuration.

    It worked well until we lost finding.

    So yeah, OpenWRT is old and not just for Linksys routers :)

  • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
    0·
    2 years 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.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I’ve used OpenWrt, DD-WRT, and Tomato firmware on the various routers I’ve had. I don’t think I’ve ever kept the stock firmware on any router I’ve owned.

    I use pfSense at home now, but I’ve been considering switching to OPNsense. I still run OpenWrt on a portable router that I use when I’m traveling though. I won’t ever buy a router that I can’t run open source firmware on.