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?

  • 486@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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…

    • dan@upvote.au
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • partizan@lemm.ee
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        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
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          1 year ago

          I don’t think their Omada routers support OpenWRT, unfortunately :(

          • partizan@lemm.ee
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            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.