[kwlug-disc] Good, non-Cisco OpenWRT routers

[Doug Moen]

Years ago I had a Cisco/Linksys router, it was flaky and unreliable. I finally diagnosed that it was intercepting and caching DNS requests, but sometimes it served a bogus IP address. Maybe a bad hash table implementation, I dunno. Anyway, it seemed like a firmware problem. I didn't use OpenWRT back then.

Cisco hasn't manufactured home routers since 2013, when they sold their home router division to Belkin (along with the Linksys brand name). Today the Linksys brand belongs to Foxconn.

Since OpenWRT varies in the level of support that they provide for different routers, my strategy is to choose hardware that is fully supported. I look for an OpenWRT port that is 1.0 or later, not beta with known bugs and unsupported features.

My research has indicated that certain Linksys models are the ones with the best support.

I have a Linksys E8450 (aka AX 3200), a wifi 6 router with 4 ethernet ports. I bought it during the Belkin era. The OpenWRT port was at release 1.0 when I installed it. It works fine.