Now I have a TP-Link TL-WR840N v4 router, and it does not suit me at all. It has very little memory and no USB to expand the memory.
Advise what from inexpensive can be bought. Internet 100 Mbit and I do not plan to increase the speed. The router should have more memory than my current one, and just in case, a USB port. The apartment is not big, a huge area of Wi-Fi coverage is not needed. Permanent devices PC by cable and smartphone. The maximum number of working devices in the house is 7. The router is needed for the VPN or Proxy to work with provider blocking bypass lists, there is just not enough memory on my current router to load the lists.
I looked at my local online store and came across the D-LINK DIR-825 model. Satisfied for the price and functionality, but I'm interested in your opinion ...
I just bought a Linksys EA8300 brand new on eBay for an absolute pittance. OpenWRT went on it first time without any problems, and it's working like a charm. If you can find one equally cheaply I'd recommend it.
That said, while it does have 256MB RAM, that's still not very much. The ACEMAGICIAN T8 Plus is a cracking little dual-NIC mini PC with 8GB of RAM, and isn't very expensive either. OpenWRT doesn't (yet) support the on-board wireless adapter, but some very clever forum members are working on that right now. If you need Wi-Fi, maybe pair it up with a separate AP or even the existing TL-WR840N for wireless capabilities.
(I appreciate that "expensive" is ultimately determined by your budget, of course.)
When i take a look at the hardware page,
i can see there's a WARNING: The DIR-825 series is prone to hardware failure of the Ethernet ports. There are numerous reports of this model developing problems with its LAN + WAN ports.
I wouldn't dare to entrust my network to such a device.
On the other hand, this model has got only 8/64MB flash/ram (unless it's a Rev. C1, which has got the double amount) just like your TP-Link. If you're going to get a new(er) router, i'd go for something bigger.
I can’t imagine what kind of load should be on the network so that even such a device would not be enough. I had enough of mine until the need to raise the VPN appeared...
Plus, if you want to add extra features on top, such as ad-blocking, or anything else which requires some form of processing, a faster CPU and more RAM is always beneficial.
What I need is not so much encryption as location spoofing. WireGuard works on a PC and on a smartphone and on my current router, and I did not notice that it required so much for its work.
Then a GRE or L2TP (without IPsec) tunnel should suffice; it fulfils the "V" and "N" aspects of "VPN". The "P" is where the encryption comes into play.
If you do not need a lot of CPU for SQM or VPN, MT7621 ramips targets are usually good buys. There are too many to make recommendations without knowing what is available in your location, but you can research what is supported by OpenWrt and go from there.
You might as well go for one that supports WiFi6 - there's not a lot of price difference anymore for that, and it will have a better chance of being useful as an AP in the future if you ever need a faster router.
It's not in the hardware database, and i can't find any commits regarding this special model.
So my conclusion is: It's not supported by OpenWrt, so don't buy it.
So maybe you should check first what's available and affordable for you and then take a look in the hardware database if it's supported.
