I have been running a couple of wireless client setups to form bridges for many years but always have to restart the routers periodically as the connection stops working after a while, many different reasons that all boil down to the same cause: closed source or semi open source drivers that just aren't as stable as they could be or are in manufactures firmwares.
A good example is AVM, their own firmware's client mode is very stable and maintains connections for weeks on end. OpenWrt on the same device results in random freezes/reconnects at least once every so many hours. But the same happens with other brands that have a client mode in their firmware.
I want to solve this if possible and my guess would be to get a router that is fully open. With drivers in the mainline kernel that are mature and stable. But I have no idea where even to begin to look.
Ideally the router has removable antenna's but I don't mind getting the soldering iron out of the router is fully open.
My "requirements" are not carved in stone, except fort that conneciuton itself needs to be stable.
OpenWrt capable of course
Wireless drivers being fully open source and very stable
6ghz support would be nice, but 5ghz is fine and the minimum
At least 1 usb port, ideally usb 3
Removable antennas
Enough resources to make run some docker instances (Pihole, etc)
I guess the only carved in stone requirements are the first 3.
Budget wise, I don't really know. I am willing to spend extra on it for it being fully open but I'm no billionaire lol.
I'm very curious what suggestions you have for me, the knowledge on these forums is vast and maybe/hopefully someone is doing similar things as me and knows just the right router to get for my networking needs the coming years!
The Xiaomi doesn't look bad and has decent specs if the price is right. I think the Zyxel is hard to beat if you don't mind staying on OpenWrt and flash over serial.
Zyxel: 4 cores @ 2ghz, 1gb of ram and 512mb of flash
Xiaomi: 2 cores @ 1.3ghz, 256mb of ram and 128 mb of flash
Of course the cpu's are different, but I assume the Zyxel is a lot faster unless I'm missing something here. It should be able to do all I need plus run extras like Pihole in docker or lxc comfortably.
I'll probably go for the Zyxel, hopefully it won't be too difficult to add one some rp-sma connectors and use proper antennas, but maybe the internal ones will do too.
They should give you a discount on your next order due to referring people
I don't know how difficult it is to go back to stock but we'll see, seems like a fun project and it's a good price under 50 for this hardware. Mediatek seems well supported unlike some Ralink and Broadcom stuff I used in the past.
Should arrive in time for the weekend!
I'll go and read the dedicated topic on it here, see what I'm getting myself into lol
I think there is a dual boot option too, less space but you can switch active partition and keep stock and OpenWrt at the same time. There is also stock Odido and stock Zyxel, the former stripped down. I'll probably try and setup a dual boot first with OpenWrt and Zyxel stock after making a backup.
We'll see if docker works, if it doesn't lxc usually works. A container with Alpine + AdGuard won't take up a lot of resources. These are arm based cpu's so I would assume both will work and it might even be possible to install other Linux distro's on it. The hard part is done I think? Device tree and kernel.
