VLAN support on 19.07.4

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I have a 10 year old Netgear WNR3500Lv1 device. I used Tomato USB on it for 2 years before moving on to DD-wrt v24 build 21061. I have been using the device only as an AP for the last 3+ years as I have moved my routing to a pfSense box. This worked for me until this past week. A good run, in my opinion.

I now want to use the WNR3500Lv1 as a VLAN enabled switch and AP. I tried setting up VLANs in DD-wrt but they would just not stick across a reboot in the DD-wrt version that I had. It's very cumbersome to keep setting 5 different VLANs each time the device reboots -- for whatever reason.

so I thought I'd upgrade my device firmware -- but diving deep into the DD-wrt wiki + peacock thread + various other threads had my head spinning. During all that research , I came across openWRT and I see that the recommended build for my device is 19.07.4.

However, I thought I'd just go back to stock firmware -- since I don't want to use any other features of a router. All I need is the device to run as an AP + switch that supports VLANs. I flashed the device back to the latest available stock firmware, and the damn Netgear firmware doesn't support VLANs at all. There is no option to even set it up.

So I am back to using DD-wrt or openWRT on it. I have 2 questions

  1. Does OpenWRT 19.07.4 support VLANs and does anyone have any experience running it successfully - especially on a WNR3500Lv1 device?
  2. Would it be worthwhile for me to install OpenWRT over DD-wrt in terms of usage. Is OpenWRT significantly different than DD-wrt?

Thanks for reading...

2

Yes.

In general, yes…
…but, the Broadcom BCM4718A1 wireless poses a problem here, as it's effectively unsupported[0] (with no chance of ever getting supported).

There are plenty much better devices available for a song on the used market, which often have full OpenWrt support, see https://openwrt.org/faq/which_router_should_i_buy and https://openwrt.org/toh/buyerguide.

--
[0] yes, there is very basic support via b43, but that's limited to 802.11abg/ 54 MBit/s at best, I don't really consider that supported.

2 Likes
3

Thats' too bad. I used to get decent speeds on that router with the DD-wrt v24 build 21061. Maybe I'll try checking if the newer DD-wrt versions provide decent WiFi speeds along with VLAN support.

I have other APs that provide sufficient coverage to my entire house. I was just planning on using the Netgear one as an additional one, since I already had it.

Thanks for your reply.