Hi there, I am considering moving from dd-wrt to openwrt, but am curious about how different this change in firmware would be. I understand that the base openwrt is to get the firmware on to the router with no bloatware, then adding items/add-ons as required via CMD. IE: IPTables, Wireguard and so on. If I do decide to start playing with openwrt, I won't have a lot of time to play with this right away, for add-ons. Without first knowing I would have the router functional for the family immediately or with little effort after the factory flash and update using something like KONG build, I may just buy another router to do this. (if I do my production router, I will put the router into recovery and flash open from dd via tftp).
So before I do this, I am curious what builds are out there to get me started on openwrt, but also allow me to be up and running with the basics easily, to start? The plan is to play with it late at night in my spare time, to get more familiar. With regard to my needs if I use the production router, I believe KONG has a base plus add-ons for the r7800 but I cannot find anything about what's included with that firmware build. Does anyone out there know a lot about the builds like KONG's, or can tell me if that build or others would at least have the following, below, covered to start? And if it difficult to get the base stuff running, like WIFI and such, to start?
What I require right away, is a very simple setup. Firewall/IPTables; Access restrictions, AP bridged to at least one LAN (would I need to do that myself right away, or does it bridge WIFI with all ports to start with, unless isolate is selected? Just how complicated is this, really?) and just one VAP isolated. There are other things, but those are the most important to start, to ensure I have a functional environment for the family needs.
I did do a lot of reading, but was not sure if access restrictions was included in that base. As far as I can tell, openVPN is not, which is one other example of an add-on I'd look into. Mostly, right now, I am curious about what's included in some of the work done by KONG and maybe others, as I start to play with it, but also not need to jump into that more extensive learning right away. So with that in mind, I am also looking at buying an 8000 to replace the production r7800, so that I can check out Kong's build and another I saw posted for the r7800 (R7800-owrt2102-r16281-6f8143fa4a-20210901-2351-factory) That way, I can have a lab to check out openwrt and some of the custom builds specific to r7800, but not get an earful from the kids and wife with the media server being down and of course, the internet lol. Thanks for the info!
Openvpn is pretty easy to use in OpenWrt, access restrictions are a little different than DD-Wrt from what I remember, meaning it's not just a click and save scenario, but doable, I haven't used Kongs build, but I'd be surprised if he didn't include Openvpn in his builds.
I decided to dig around for my old 6250 and restored it back to Genie (had Advanced Tomato on it) As for KONGs build, I'll come back to that later, once I get the feel of openwrt. Kind of the reverse of what I wanted to do, but saves me buying another r7800 to test with.
I grabbed the following build for the 6250 and just want to be sure it's good to use, since it was just uploaded yesterday. I should be okay with this one? (openwrt-21.02.0-bcm53xx-generic-netgear_r6250-squashfs) Or should I go with the 19?
In theory either should be good. The number in the release is the date. "21.02" was branched off and prepared for release since February 2021
"19.07" was the release from last year (kind of)
Been using Kong builds from the days of DDWRT on my Linksys WRT1900 ACS which always worked great now using a Netgear R7800 with OpenWRT and stuck to Kong builds as its someone i trust
PS i just swapped over to their 21.02 builds and no problems so far with all my devices
In my builds I have included apps, that I use daily, the rest must be installed through packages, for each build I have a package repo. Not all packages from official repos are compatible with custom builds, as some have deps that look for git/kernel revision signature. If it comes to changes, there are little in my build. I ship a custom css for material theme and there are a few system tweaks here and there. Besides that I also have a build that comes with qca nss driver to utilize the hw network offload + sqm script, which enables the R7800 to do traffic shaping on a 1Gbps line, witout hw accell it can only shape between 300-500Mbps. QCA nss is not included in any official builds only a few user builds, like mine and acwifidude and we maintain the codebase for it, which you can find on my github repo. Of course I use these builds myself, thus they receive some testing. With official builds it is not always guaranteed, that they work, happened a few times in the past, that a changeset broke on or more units until someone noticed and filed a bug report.
