Best router for home use?
I am planning to eventually build my own home server, and when I do I will hook it up via ethernet. But I do want to switch away from the generic FIOS router and use my own for more control over my data and security. Any recommendations?
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I'm a noob, but I'm running a Frirzbox router and it seems great to me. 0 problem in configuration and happened to have lots of useful features now that I'm exploring self hosting (it support woreguard VPN natively and have automatic wakeonlan feature for my server)
I always found the software updates of AVM - the manufacturer of those "Fritz!Box"es - to be of questionable quality. If you take a look at the source code that they have to release upon request of the GPL'ed source code they use, you'll notice that they use ancient versions of the Linux kernel, Busybox and other tools. By ancient, I mean many years old, unsupported by upstream for years. Also, they only publish those sources manually when someone asks for them, which doesn't bode well for their internal development processes. If they used CI/CD pipelines, they could easily push out updates of those sources with every new release…
Same with a lot of manufacturers, unfortunately. This is not uncommon. The manufacturers get the base software from the manufacturer of the SOC (system on a chip) used by the router. This software is usually from when the chip series was first in development, and they never update it.
TP-Link make great hardware that works well, but even their newest routers are based on a version of OpenWRT from 5+ years ago with a Linux 4.x kernel.
but what is nice, many tp-link hw can run regular openwrt, which is way better than the thing they provide...
I don't think their Omada routers support OpenWRT, unfortunately :(
The Omada probably not. But many other tp-link routers support it, especially the low spec ones. I mean, if we are getting to something more performant and feature rich, there are probably much better options, like Turris Omnia, some Microtik stuff and many other.
I’m a professional in software development, sometimes tasked with administration stuff.
At home I love my FRITZ!Box. The only thing I’m missing is DNS rewriting, but I can work around that. If you don’t know what that is you don’t need it anyway.
Yes! I asked their support several times for that, but without success :(
Another thing I don't like about my fritz box is that the DHCP server for some reason assigns a single DNS server to the computers in the network