this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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OpenWRT is cool, but I prefer OPNSense because unlike OpenWRT, you can actually upgrade OPNSense in its UI without requiring linux partition surgery.
What are you talking about? Upgrading on OpenWRT only takes the new ROM image uploaded thru the Web UI.
The in-place upgrade process leaves a lot to be desired, in my experience. I understand why routers with limited storage capacity wouldn't be able to support it, but the lack of A-B partitioning support for x86 and ARM builds in 2024 is really stupid.
If an upgrade introduces a regression and breaks, my family is stuck without internet while I spend a few hours re-flashing an old release and making sure everything still works.
This, right here, has been my experience every time.
Also when you run a complicated setup with over a dozen VLANs, policy routing for failover internet on specific vlans, and nat66 support due to secondary internet only giving you a /64, yeah... not fun having to set all that up because the updater breaks, yeah.... no.
The Linksys WRT3200ACM has A/B firmware support, but unfortunately that router is starting to get a little outdated. Saved me from a couple bad upgrades, but unfortunately it died on me about 4 months ago. I updated to the Banana Pi BPI-R3, which has been great for my network speed, but was a lot more complicated to set up.
I lost all my data from my router trying to update it using the ui and had to reconfigure everything. I use linux for a long time, but openwrt is on another level
I broke my router updating OpenWRT :(
Every single time I've setup OpenWRT, keeping it updated was much more painful than anything else, even ASUS WRT-Merlin was easier to keep updated.
Are you trying to say you're not a fan of needing to reinstall packages after an upgrade? It's so simple with these easy to remember commands:
That's why I wrote an Ansible playbook, to configure and update my router and access points. It's nice having this almost as infrastructure-aa-code, with all configuration changes under version control with a clear commit message. The script is available at https://github.com/danielvijge/openwrt-configuration-ansible, but do make some changes to match your configuration. I keep my network configuration (inventory file) in a separate, private GitHub repo, as that contains passwords etc.
Weird. Been upgrading several OpenWrt machines for many years now. Click a button in the UI, select a file, click another button to update.
OpenWRT is a different scope than opnSense.
I have a few OpenWRT devices to cover WiFi in my home and definitely an opnSense on top of them for wan access and all the fancy stuff.
OpnSense can't to WiFi access point, thanks to BSD limited WiFi cards support, and definitely cannot fit on cots devices like OpenWRT can.
As well as indeed opnSense is a better choice than OpenWRT for edge devices.
While OpenWRT would do opsSense job, at least in part, the opposite is not true.
I use Unifi Access Points for wifi
I personally just buy MikroTik routers. Yeah, they're not FOSS AFAIK, but they work really well and there are a ton of guides and whatnot. They also have a good assortment of hardware, so finding the right fit for my network is pretty easy.
If I ever decided to go away from MikroTik, I'd probably DIY my own router instead of going w/ something like OpenWRT. I did my time w/ DD-WRT, Tomato, and OpenWRT, and honestly, I prefer my MikroTik router.
I once setup MikroTik routers... they were cool, but the ipv6 implementation required manual intervention - this is not something you want with an isp that dynamically rotates their ipv6 addresses often. Once I discovered pfSense/OPNSense, it was so much better in configurability and ease of upgrade, as those OSses are FreeBSD-based and designed to run on PCs.
My ISP doesn't support IPv6, so I haven't needed to touch that, but we'll be getting muni fiber soon-ish (they claim the next year or two), so that could change. I'll definitely think about upgrading to pfSense or something when that happens.