New to open wrt and want to install on TP-Link Archer C2 AC750

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hey guys. I have had non stop issue with someone cracking my wifi router. I am really not sure who or why, but seeing how easy they seem to be able to do it, I am guessing it is a room mate or something. I live in a large house shared by several people.

I am connected to a bigger router in the living room which I have little control over. But I have my own router in my room. I basically just want to know how to better protect my own room and devices.

I got WPS turned off and reset the modem and changed all of the passwords. I went ahead and disabled 5ghz because I read that there is no support to that.

And as for my model, it is TP-Link Archer C2 AC750. And also wondering, is linux required to run this? I am new to all of this, and don't know a lot about networking yet, but I do have ubuntu dual booted and can run that if need be. I have located the instructions on the website but so far they do not make a lot of sense to me other than trying to run the firmware under the firmware upgrade option, and that is not working.

Any help would be much appreciated. I would just like to secure my network and not have to worry about it getting cracked so easily. Thanks in advance everyone.

2

It really depends a lot on what "cracked" actually means here, how you notice them, what they're actually doing and how they (might) get in.

If they have physical access to the device (and your room), its somewhere between hard and impossible to prevent them from reading out the wireless credentials (or WAN auth data, but that probably doesn't apply here).

The router itself will run Linux (both your OEM firmware now - or OpenWrt), you or your clients don't need to, unless you want to build (imagebuilder) or compile OpenWrt or additional features yourself (MacOSX would also be an option, as well as Windows 10's WSL2; FreeBSD should also be possible, but no one reported success in probably a decade).

3

A warning : do not rename file name to use tftp flash. c2's tftp firmware need bootloader attached in front of file, and it doesn't have safety check so using wrong firmware (like normal sysupgrade firmware) will brick the router.