Recently I got a AVM FRITZ!Box 7362 SL to backup my Asus Rt-56U in case it ever died.
What I am really using openwrt for is shared smartphone tethering, in which all my internet access goes through. How I configure openwrt is like this. I set the lan to the apple hotspot range like 172.20.10.10. I configure everything with static unique ips. I bridge the ipeth device and the lan device together. This way I can have the iphone directly access file shares on the computers. There is no NAT, because the iphone does the NAT.
So it basically works, and I am using it to write this, but what I have seen is I copy things like pictures from my phone to windows shares on pcs, and it sometimes totally hangs the system. So I am guessing it has something to do with flat out USB throughput.
Every certain time this happens the whole unit freezes, and the box is not pingable. I was looking for solutions like degrading the usb rate, limiting the usb rate. etc?
I don't seem to have this problem with the RT-56U.
I think there still may be a USB issue, or kernel issue, or my unit has a bad part(s), but I found another way that is OK. I made the wireless a DHCP client of the hotspot and then port forwarded 2 samba related tcp ports to my main computer. It works about as well, maybe not quite as zippy on the web browsing. I am testing the same transfers to see if I can make it fail without using USB.
I don't know why I could not bridge wlan0 to br-lan. wlan0 worked fine when it was not in the range of br-lan but put them in the same segment and bridge br-lan to wlan0 and nothing gets though. I gave up. Traditionally I had preferred to have just 1 NAT stage, that is by the apple hotspot. I read there is sometimes issues with bridging wlan in client mode.
Also I was using a USB extension cable to try to avoid wear on the usb port. The cable has shown some weird behaviour on a new netgear 4300 openwrt unit involving seeming repeated rapid disconnection for no reason, so I decided not to use it. There may have been some freezing without it, can't recall.
Recently I turned it into a NAS box and a overnight downloader for a slow cell phone link and I am testing if there is a (memory stick) USB problem but so far it is doing well.
Still doing pretty well using a USB stick (Kingstons). Read Wrote about 15Gb about 10 of which were test diffs with no binary errors. Seemed to pause once but did not fail.