Comment on Best secure router for home use?
486@kbin.social 1 year agoI 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…
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
Same with a lot of manufacturers, unfortunately. 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. This is not uncommon - the manufacturers usually get the base software from the SOC manufacturer and never update it.
partizan@lemm.ee 1 year ago
but what is nice, many tp-link hw can run regular openwrt, which is way better than the thing they provide…
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
I don’t think their Omada routers support OpenWRT, unfortunately :(
partizan@lemm.ee 1 year ago
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.