Hi,
I am looking to replace my starlink router with something under £60 (if I can) that I can install my first openwrt and take advantage of VPN, adblock, prevent ISP snooping, and utilize any other security features to improve mine as I'm dealing with precious data.
I checked the guides and lists and my local availability; is this router good?
or amazon link https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08DVGFRXW
Hoping to install and learn as I go with the different features.
thanks in advance!
Check if the RT3200 is still on sale for 50£ at ebuyer or Amazon.
Wow, I almost didn't post in here to check, glad I did. Got myself one 
Thank you Sir!
Great choice! I have three myself.
BTW you might like to try out CAKE w/ adaptive bandwidth on your Starlink connection to keep latency low despite the highly variable bandwidth nature of Starlink. It has been shown to work well for Starlink (albeit we only have data from one or two Starlink testers). We could do with more Starlink testers for further development. Recently we have just added code to compensate for Starlink satellite switches. See this thread and recent posts concerning Starlink with plots:
By way of background, one strength of OpenWrt (amongst the others you mentioned) is its so-called smart queue management to keep latency low. CAKE is one option offered, and works very well but is limited to accepting fixed bandwidths for download and upload. After a lot of work we have managed to dynamically set the CAKE bandwidth on the fly for variable rate connections like LTE and Starlink, which should allow smooth Teams and Zoom calls (and otherwise low latency) even when saturating download and/or uploaad.
So you might like to try this out on your shiny new RT3200 to help you get the most out of your Starlink connection and if you do please keep us posted on the thread I linked above.
I hope you enjoy your new device and OpenWrt.
Interesting project, I'm intrigued. I'll have a read through.
I may have a little play with warcraft classic so low latency would be great. I'd be happy to help contribute if I can. Thanks for the link, kindly!
Worth trying since without any kind of sqm latency on Starlink seems pretty dire, but it looks like we can get it down to 95% sub 100ms, which I imagine would be fine for Warcraft classic, and is certainly fine for Zoom and Teams. It's fairly easy to set up and on that thread there'll be tons of help if you need it. I'd also be intrigued to see if your VPN actually gives you better performance incase it circumvents any tinkering by Starlink.
Oh another thing - for security you probably also want to setup DNS over tls.
That is to ensure your DNS queries are encrypted since otherwise by default they will go out unencrypted from router through port 53 and not through VPN.
And for OpenWrt version probably use either latest master snapshot or 22.03 branch snapshot.
Sorry for the delay, I had to literally wiki every term in your post but that's what I wanted - to learn 
Can you elaborate on the tinkering the starlink may do? A quick search hasn't shown any results on the ISP - whether that is starlink itself or another provider since I am only certain that starlink is merely a relay infrastructure.
I'd very much appreciate if you could list any dependencies that 'I' might need to learn in order to go from noob to installed openwrt with all of the privacy and speed goodies. When I say 'I', I mean to update my operating system, dairymilkbatmans' model >.< To point me in the right directions so that I can go off and assimilate all the necessary prerequisites.
Vodafone UK appear to apply 10Mbit/s throttling on ports 80 and 443 in violation of net neutrality, and some have wondered whether tinkering like this might be applied in respect of Starlink connections as well. In the case of Vodafone UK such tinkering can be circumvented with the use of a VPN, and so it was wondered whether the use of a VPN might circumvent any such tinkering in Starlink.
I would like to provide a link to a kind of OpenWrt beginner's guide resource, but I don't think it exists. I came up with the idea of an OpenWrt University for experts to convey information to interested individuals, but this idea hasn't taken off. A problem with nerds is that they don't always like investing effort into helping others learn and/or are not always good at it.
I think the main way to learn with OpenWrt at present is by doing, and in such doing looking up what limited information there is on the wiki and on this forum and asking relevant questions. Certainly the forum is very responsive to questions. There is also an IRC channel.
This site:
provides a test and some background on bufferbloat (which I understand to be what happens when data transfer rates exceed capacity, leading to buffering and latency spikes).
Also on specifically DNS encryption, this is quite helpful:
Starlink has arrived, I'm about to attempt my first openwrt install - I was thinking of flashing my old BT router as practice in case I brick my shiny RT3200 
Just wanted to check a discrepancy with the file names. I've downloaded a prebuilt file from: https://github.com/dangowrt/owrt-ubi-installer/releases
Should I be using both of these files? (the installer and upgrade) or use the upgrade file from the device page here: https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/e8450
Not sure what release is latest and the file names are not identical?
Thanks for the help Lynx, looking forward to installing dns,vpn,adblock
Agreed 100%.
We as nerds, sometimes assume noobs know the basics of the software we are trying to explain, that is why I am a fan of video tutorials. Just follow the video and it will be done.
Just follow the guide here:
Be very careful about which files you flash. During this initial one off installation if you flash the wrong files you can end up seriously regretting it. If in any shred of doubt whatsoever post on the E8450/RT3200 thread to check.
Once installed things are much more straightforward.
You can just upgrade to the latest 22.03 snapshot (nice and stable) using 'auc':
auc -b 22.03 -B 22.03-SNAPSHOT
That will get snapshots onto the 22.03 branch and then you can upgrade as and when using attended sysupgrade in LuCi.
All went well many thanks!
Now for some goodies :~)
Enjoy! I use: WireGuard for VPN and Netifd based pbr for VPN with wan failover ; CAKE using my own recipe to deal with VPN pbr + CAKE-autorate for sqm; stubby for encrypted DNS and use CleanBrowsing Family filter to filter out obscene content; DNS hijacking to redirect DNS to my own server of choice; rclone and samba for cloud mount for scanner upload pdf's direct to cloud via network share; and WDS with fast transition for full WiFi coverage with roaming.
OpenWrt unlocks so many possibilities.
Perfect, you've made me a list to work through and apply - much appreciated!
Before I start, what benchmark commands should I run so I can make a before and after? I've got the bloat test above to do and some speed tests. Latency is pretty good surprisingly!
why not use mesh instead of WDS?
You can but it's only needed if say you have AP that indirectly wirelessly connects to router via another AP. And adding and removing APs. WDS offers greater throughput otherwise and in my experience with the RT3200 was less buggy.
You can use iperf3 to verify transfer speeds between wireless or wired clients.
Also the betterspeedtest.sh script is useful to see latency measured during lengthier speed tests.
Are you using the latest snapshot on your rt3200 Lynx? I ask because my kernel version is: 5.10.113, wireguard requires 5.10.127 or did you build you own with wireguard? I didn't build my own because I worried I lacked the necessary skills >.<
how to run the script,
sh netperfrunner.sh
I followed the following guide
opkg update
opkg install netperf
opkg install git
cd /usr/lib
git clone https://github.com/richb-hanover/OpenWrtScripts.git
but when I run
root@OpenWrt:~# sh netperfrunner.sh
sh: can't open 'netperfrunner.sh': No such file or directory
root@OpenWrt:~#