Perhaps but I believe passionately in the right to run open systems, to tinker and to repair, all of which are increasingly difficult these days - not helped by the bulk of consumers who do not understand that these rights are important or that they are being eroded.
Chez moi in the UK all of my routers/APs run OpenWrt with the exception of the main gateway/firewall which runs Fedora Server, the central switch will probably be on OpenWrt as soon as I can satisfy myself that all the features I use are supported - but itās looking good. OpenWrt on switches is an area of development as they usually do not have very powerful CPUs since the CPU is just here to set up the Layer 2 switch and run a web UI - but hardware offload is not always that mature in OpenWrt.
Me too but Iām very conscious that, if I were to do what you do and then fall off my perch, my wife would be stuffed so all of the internet stuff is basically on standard settings.
Iāve used dd-wrt on my Asus routers for several years now. Itās just so much better and more flexible than the stock software. I have a quite complicated (read impossible for stock software) repeater/relay setup on one of them for my telescope. Never tried OpenWRT so I may give it a look.
I donāt know how much active development is going into dd-wrt at the moment. The most recent ānewsā items on the home are from 2022. There are some posts on the forum and some recent commits to the repository but I would be put off by a home page that talks of licence activation and the ārolling betaā release model means you canāt point to a particular version and say āthat worksā.
Latest build of dd-wrt was 5 days ago. The website is very confusing and if you use the router database for your router is will give the last build in 2020 or so which is wrong. Not sure who maintains the website but theyāre doing an awful job. If you look in the beta section youāll see lots of much more up to date builds for all sorts of routers, including my Asus routers.
OTOH I can go to the OpenWrt downloads page and pull either the current snapshot or a numbered release for a much wider range of hardware and donāt have to wonder whether I need to buy a licence.
Thereās always pfSense if you want a genuine FLOSS alternative, and I think FreshTomato is still kicking around (albeit for a relatively narrow range of hardware). There are multiple niche spinoffs of all the main ones as well.
Well, SFR turned up at the appointed hour and I now have fibre so several more brownie points than Orange. Speed is āwithin expectationsā - that is I get just under 1Gb/s up and downstream to the directly connected server.
WiFi will need some tweaking, possibly a general upgrade to WiFi6 or WiFi7 hardware.
As expected SFR are using carrier grade NAT, though IPv6 is enabled on the interface.
The aspect which is āa bit disappointing is the SFR box 8 - the UI is slow beyond belief and took so long to come back after I disabled WiFi that I genuinely thought I had broken it somehow.
Yeah, the Box 8 is a bit sh**. It does shovel data though. I did get over 2Gbps initially. Checked a few days ago and about 1.7Gbps. good enough for me. Never seen a slow UI though, always been snappy for me.
13 seconds to display the home page after logging in compared with about 3 for the OpenWrt AP that I use (a D-Link Dir-882).
Itās a fairly generic Chinese device lots of specs online eg here but so far everything skirts around what SoC it is based on. Quite a few photos and sundry other info on the FCC device page. From the internal photos it looks as though there might be a serial port but access to the pins is blocked by the stickers on the bottom of the device.
Nmap says the box is running a Linux 4.x or 5.x kernel - perhaps I should ask SFR to supply me with source code for all the GPLed software in the box.
OK it runs micro_httpd which seems to have been last updated 12 years ago. With a fairly long list of CVEs against it since that date, I note.
It seems you canāt download firmware, updates are automatic, thereās almost certainly a GPL violation here. Any wonder I want devices that are actually under my control?
The tools menu has a software download option on mine. Also, stopping someone from manually downloading code to the box isnāt a GPL2 violation. Iām no GPL expert, but AFAIK, as long as you can get the source code and modify it and build it with the appropriate tools then strictly speaking thatās all that is required. We had this issue out with NDS as all their boxes are locked down as are all other STBs.
The first is GPL. If it is running Linux or other GPLed (which seems possible, at least) code then there is no mention of source availability - which would be a GPL violation.
Yes, there is a āfirmware upgradeā option in tools which allows you to upload a firmware image to the device. However there is no firmware downloads page and looking at chatter online (SFR have some customer service forums) firmware update is automatic - so that takes control of the process away from the user and the update could just as easily remove features as add them (OK, possibly not that likely I agree).
The issue with automatic updates and the GPL is only that it makes it much harder to work out if there is GPLed code running on the device because it is difficult or impossible to get hold of a firmware image to analyse.
To be fair this hardware is rented so it is not mine to tinker with but GPL violations really āirk me. Probably more so than simply using closed source firmware on this sort of device.
It almost certainly uses Linux I would think. If no source is available then that would be a GPL violation. In saying that, there is no responsibility for the manufacturer to advertise it as such, but you do have to be able to ask and SFR should be able to tell you. Also, its the manufacturer rather than their customer (SFR) that is responsible for providing the source code, although if you canāt figure out who that is then that could be a problem. We had a publicly available website with all our GPL source code on it for all the Linux based STBs we designed and manufactured. As for being able to take the image out to examine it, that isnāt covered by the GPL.
Giving me a device with firmware covered by the GPL requires that the distributor tell me of my rights under the GPL.
No, SFR is providing me with the binary (in the device or by pushing new firmware out to the device), it is they that have the onus of informing me of my rights under the GPL and supplying source code. They arenāt allowed to use clause 3 because thatās only for non commercial distribution and then only if you are re-distributing something you only received in binary form.
True but hiding your binary to avoid people even discovering that the box has GPLed code hardly fits with the spirit of the licence and may even suggest that you know you are violating the licence.
Sadly it is all too common a phenomenon with routers and similar devices coming out of China.
Tear-down here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zum-f-3G4D4 seems to go over the hardware well (but an odd fixation on RFI and why on earth measure it with the screening cans removed).
Broadcom BM68360 - 2 core Arm64 (Cortex B53) at 1.5GHz with 1GB RAM and 8GB EMC - the hardware (as the reviewer says) is kind-of meh, nothing special.
Honestly the CPU is actually not much more impressive than the Dir-882 which has a dual core/quad thread 880Mhz MIPS32.
RAM and EMC, however, are massive for this class of device - normally youād expect the storage capacities for routers etc to be measured in megabytes, not gigabytes.
Thereās one on eBay for a few quid, have acquired it for a bit of poking around that connector (which would be accessible but for the stickers on the bottom of the case).
