router brands

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

i was thinking of getting either a netgear R6250, an asus router, and a buffalo WZR-1166DHP.

does anyone know the life expectancy on these routers? i remember most of netgears routers and wireless adapters only lasted a few months to a year for me. i did buy one of their wireless network adapters and it seems to be working fine since its already been a year, but im still skeptic on their lifespan.

im going to be using dd-wrt on one of these routers.

 

[petteyg359]

Which Asus router?

For various reaons, including possible GPL violations, I strongly prefer OpenWRT over DD-WRT. Neither that Buffalo or Netgear are supported, but TP-Link TL-WDR7500 has been working for a few hundred revisions. I'll wait to go 802.11ac until there are more routers out with decent support. My Netgear WNDR3700 has been doing fine with OpenWRT snapshot versions.

 

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

Which Asus router?

For various reaons, including possible GPL violations, I strongly prefer OpenWRT over DD-WRT. Neither that Buffalo or Netgear are supported, but TP-Link TL-WDR7500 has been working for a few hundred revisions. I'll wait to go 802.11ac until there are more routers out with decent support. My Netgear WNDR3700 has been doing fine with OpenWRT snapshot versions.

im not some guy who codes. im a guy who likes to setup things and watch them work.

 

[petteyg359]

im not some guy who codes. im a guy who likes to setup things and watch them work.

Being "some guy who codes" is really irrelevant. It's more like being some guy who doesn't like people to profit off of another's work while giving nothing back.

Regardless, OpenWRT has a much greater feature set out of the box, due to opkg, and they actually have a working QoS implementation. Every time I've attempted to use QoS on a DD-WRT system, it has either done nothing or caused degraded performance for every connection. DD-WRT development seems to be kind of whacko lately, too. You have to dig through the forums to find out who is actually making good builds for a specific hardware model, then you have to dig through the downloads directories to even find where their builds are, and hope the good revision still exists.

 

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

Being "some guy who codes" is really irrelevant. It's more like being some guy who doesn't like people to profit off of another's work while giving nothing back.

Regardless, OpenWRT has a much greater feature set out of the box, due to opkg, and they actually have a working QoS implementation. Every time I've attempted to use QoS on a DD-WRT system, it has either done nothing or caused degraded performance for every connection. DD-WRT development seems to be kind of whacko lately, too. You have to dig through the forums to find out who is actually making good builds for a specific hardware model, then you have to dig through the downloads directories to even find where their builds are, and hope the good revision still exists.

what makes you say that? i just want to install it and then run it. i have no motivation to go through some command prompt and other complicated sorts just to install features that i would use. if i have something to give, ill give it. i just dont have anything that would be useful.

does openwrt have support for a linksys EA6300? can i use it as a client bridge?

i tried using opkg on kongs builds but that did not work out well for me. if they work better on openwrt, i might look more into it.

 

[petteyg359]

what makes you say that? i just want to install it and then run it. i have no motivation to go through some command prompt and other complicated sorts just to install features that i would use. if i have something to give, ill give it. i just dont have anything that would be useful.

You don't have to. That's exactly the kind of clueless silliness that ignorant people use to bash Linux. OpenWRT has a perfectly decent web UI, just like any other home router firmware.

does openwrt have support for a linksys EA6300? can i use it as a client bridge?

No; see OpenWRT Table of Hardware. OpenWRT seems to favor more Atheros devices, where DD-WRT has better Broadcom support.

i tried using opkg on kongs builds but that did not work out well for me. if they work better on openwrt, i might look more into it.

 

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

No; see OpenWRT Table of Hardware. OpenWRT seems to favor more Atheros devices, where DD-WRT has better Broadcom support.

if openwrt dosent support the new broadcom routers, then i cant use it.

just so you know, i use my e3000 router as a client bridge (connect to parents wifi. i live with them.) and as an AP (when parents are not home). kong is making newer dd-wrt builds that support netgears AC routers. i just want to know the life expectancy and quality on netgear and buffalo. i have been using linksys for dd-wrt, but since linksys's AC routers have no dd-wrt firmware available to them yet, im going to try either netgear or buffalo.

what im trying to ask is how the life expectancy and quality is on buffalo and netgear routers. i dont want to purchase either one and find that the 100 dollar router died within 6 months.

 

[petteyg359]

if openwrt dosent support the new broadcom routers, then i cant use it.

Why? Atheros has perfectly good ac chipsets. There's nothing that prevents you from running different firmwares on different systems.

just so you know, i use my e3000 router as a client bridge

I've got a WRT350N working as a client bridge to my WNDR3700 right now.

kong is making newer dd-wrt builds that support netgears AC routers

If you're already dead set on that router, then why are you even asking here? Just get it. Like I said earlier, I'm going to wait for somebody else (maybe you ) to work out the annoying issues before I upgrade to 11ac.

what im trying to ask is how the life expectancy and quality is on buffalo and netgear routers. i dont want to purchase either one and find that the 100 dollar router died within 6 months.

There's variation and duds in every product line, regardless of manufacturer. I can tell you that all my Netgear hardware has been pretty good, except for an old 11b router, and the one Buffalo client adapter I had was crappy, but the subset of people that have made simultaneous daily use every router/adapter in whatever list X provided by person Y for Z amount of time is quite small. Hey, at least I'm keeping your thread active, maybe one of them will see it

 

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

the last time i tried a broadcom-atheros client bridge was between a cisco and buffalo router. did not work on dd-wrt. but if your talking about openwrt being able to connect an atheros router to a broadcom in client bridge mode without any problems, then i might reconsider.

im not look for a "god like perfect" router. im just looking for a router that most people have had the most luck with on its life expectancy and quality.

look, in the past, linksys has ran great for me. netgear has not. netgear only lasted 6 months to 1 year and i still have my linksys router to this day. i also tried d-link and belkin and they both lasted a little longer than netgear, but didnt have a long life time.

but kong here is telling me that most of his older wireless N netgear routers are still working fine for him. which is why im considering netgear but then thought of asking people here if they have a netgear or buffalo router that is still working fine for them.

i wanna buy something that lasts till i no longer need it anymore (which is in a few years. not months).

so just to confirm things here, if your saying that your client bridge (which uses an atheros cpu) is able to connect to your access point that uses a broadcom processor, then i will check out the atheros routers that openwrt supports and try it myself. thanks for the info.

if anyone else wants to add, i would like to read what you have to type to me. thanks in advance.

 

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

so i decided to try out openwrt on my e3000 just to get the feel of it.

unfortunately, i have webui. so i using putty to connect to it instead. i did see that openwrt was working. after looking around on openwrt wiki to see what was going on, i found that the webui is not installed and that telnet will disable after setting a password.

genius. so now im stuck with a router that im trying to tftp flash back to dd-wrt to test out one guys build and then flash to tomato if it dosent work great.

so what can i do now petty? i wish you told me this earlier.

EDIT: i think i got it solved. i had grab a wireless network adapter and share it to my computers ethernet adapter. then grab a switch and hok up the computer up to a regular port and then hook the routers wan port up the a regular port as well. i installed luci and now i have webui.

is there an openwrt build that has a webui already installed so i dont have to do this every time i experiment someones build just to see how well it works?

 

[petteyg359]

so i decided to try out openwrt on my e3000 just to get the feel of it.

unfortunately, i have webui. so i using putty to connect to it instead. i did see that openwrt was working. after looking around on openwrt wiki to see what was going on, i found that the webui is not installed and that telnet will disable after setting a password.

genius. so now im stuck with a router that im trying to tftp flash back to dd-wrt to test out one guys build and then flash to tomato if it dosent work great.

so what can i do now petty? i wish you told me this earlier.

EDIT: i think i got it solved. i had grab a wireless network adapter and share it to my computers ethernet adapter. then grab a switch and hok up the computer up to a regular port and then hook the routers wan port up the a regular port as well. i installed luci and now i have webui.

is there an openwrt build that has a webui already installed so i dont have to do this every time i experiment someones build just to see how well it works?

Which version did you use? The latest release is Attitude Adjustment. Snapshot (or "nightly" or "trunk") is Barrier Breaker. Did you use the pre-built image, or make your own?

If the web-ui isn't working for some reason:

Use 'opkg list-installed | grep luci'. If there aren't a bunch of packages listed, then you want to do 'opkg install luci-mod-admin-full'. Might also have to '/etc/init.d/uhttpd start'.

 

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

i got it working, but then i tried to flash back. i ended up hard bricking it so now i have to go back to my wrt300n. i am not going to use openwrt for a long time after what happened to my e3000.

time to order a nokia adapter.

EDIT: i flashed a snapshot build. heres the link to that snapshot build.

http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/brcm47xx/openwrt-e3000_v1-squashfs.bin