this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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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.

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[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 5 points 7 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 5 points 7 months ago

been running it for years now, no weird sudden stability problems whatsoever.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Some routers have dual partition setup.

Active and backup. When flashing firmware, it is flashed to the backup partition. If the router boots successfully, the newly flashed backup partition becomes active and vice versa. If things screw up, nothing happens.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Thanks for the info. Thats not exactly what I meant. I‘m not afraid of the router itself breaking at installation but freezing for example and not being able to reboot. I usually dont tinker with mission critical stuff.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 7 months ago

I know you likely have moved on but it would be interesting to actually figure out the cause. What steps would someone need to take to reproduce the issue?

[–] drwho@beehaw.org 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The same thing can happen to manufacturer firmware. Only you'd have much less capability to troubleshoot, let alone fix it.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

True but manufacturers are in big trouble if stuff like this breaks where I live so they are very eager to provide such service and additionally, the brand my router is from is generally considered rather good.

[–] drwho@beehaw.org 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] drwho@beehaw.org 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Gotcha. Very different in the States in this regard.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

In a lot of regards that concern QoL, sadly. Have a good one.

[–] drwho@beehaw.org 1 points 7 months ago
[–] mfat@lemdro.id 1 points 7 months ago

That's exactly what I do. You can keep your ISP router and hook up your openwrt router to one of its lan ports and have two wifi networks.

[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

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 you pick decent hardware eg. Netgear R7800 you won't have issues. I've units of those running OpenWrt at home and a few small offices running for years with a lot of clients and traffic and they're rock solid.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It is not normal for it to just stop working

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Stable? In my experience OpenWRT is very stable. Can you share the hardware and software you were using?

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago

my hardware configuration on openwrt is very stable too