For those of you who might run across this thread and may not know what is going on or what to believe.
The davidc502 builds are a 3rd party build base on OpenWrt trunk sources. I've been compiling these 3rd party builds for probably over 4 years now, and it started from me compiling my own, and others wanting to try it out. I first put the builds up on my ISP's provided web space, but quickly transferred everything over to my own server. Since this is OpenSource software/firmware, I don't get paid for anything I do, and so I wanted to keep my costs down. I found a good deal for a 24/7 server running CentOS, with plenty of CPU/RAM and Disc space for 20 bucks a month over at Linode. Originally, I didn't want to buy a domain or purchase DNS services, so I went with dynamic-dns.net which is a free domain, and I used it for several years, and has worked great. However, a couple weeks back the domain went of line, and all DNS for all of dynamic-dns (not just my site), stopped working for weeks. So, I ended up buying my own domain for 15 bucks a year and it includes DNS services, so I'm pretty happy with that. So, a couple of weeks ago I just switched my TLS certificate over from dynamic-dns.net to .org, and I'm happy with it. Because there are thousands of people who have saved favorites and have these builds going back years that point to davidc502sis.dynamic-dns.net, I didn't just want to pull the plug on that DNS resolution, so I have kept it going (It is free so it doesn't matter). Just pulling the plug would create more confusion and I wanted to avoid it. So, on the website I put in bold letters for everyone to start using the dc502wrt.org URL instead of the old one.
In closing, I've been in IT for nearly 2 decades, and currently have been working in Cyber Security for going on 4 years now. One thing I wanted to do is to provide a safe 3rd party build for everyone to try without worry of tampering or anything malicious. As someone who is ethical this is very important to me because there are 3rd party builds out there where you really don't know the source or intent. As someone who works Cybersecurity at the Enterprise level, I am very cautious about what I put on my own machines or routers. Speaking of security, I even enlisted a company to test the website for vulnerabilities once a week to ensure I don't miss anything. No matter what you do no one is 100% secure, but for spending a minimal amount of money I have tried my best.
So with that, if you have one of the routers the build supports I hope you try it out. One of the advantages is the build contains some of the more popular packages people enjoy. Another advantage is you can install a build, and 1 year later still download packages for that build, and believe me, monitoring the webserver, people every day download packages from builds months and months ago.
If you have further questions or concerns feel free to drop me a line in the davidc502 thread here at the openwrt forums -- Davidc502- wrt1200ac wrt1900acx wrt3200acm wrt32x builds
Thanks,
David
P.S.
Someone made a comment about the name of the build starting with "LEDE", and the assumption was it was old, which is completely false. Nothing wrong with the assumption, if I didn't know about the 3rd party build I might have come to the same conclusion, so I made a change right now.
In the build configuration, I have the option to name the distribution to whatever I want. A long time ago I set it as LEDE and frankly just forgot it was there. So I just changed it back to OpenWrt. This means the next build the images will start with OpenWrt.
