EdgeRouter 4 w/OpenWrt

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jjacobs

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Dec 25, 2020
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I have an EdgeRouter 4 installed at a family members house along with a few Unifi nanoHD access points. The WAPs have been flashed with OpenWrt and work great. I'm considering flashing the router with OpenWrt. Reasons are many, EoL Debian and general Ubiquiti nonsense (face palm). They're all hand-me-downs from my home network. That's a separate discussion...

Anyone have any experience with OpenWrt on the EdgeRouter 4 (or 6 or 12)? Looks straight forward to flash. I gather that HW offload isn't supported, not sure if that's for ideological reasons or other reasons. Shouldn't be an issue in this case. 300/20 Comcast xfiniti. It is a router on a stick configuration but only very light inter-vlan routing (DNS traffic to a pihole and printers). I also have smart queuing setup to manage buffer bloat, same or better appear to be available with OpenWRT. OpenWrt forum posts on this particular router are thin, maybe that's good ;)

Anyhow, any thoughts or experiences you may share to help me purge myself of the last bit of Ubiquiti firmware I have to mess with would be enormously appreciated.
 
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XeonLab

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Aug 14, 2016
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Not ER-4, but I've been running an ER-X in a similar "deploy at your (grand)parents house and check once a year if wall wart PSU is still fine" situation plus AC AP Lite with OpenWRT for months now with no issues whatsoever. Reasoning was quite similar with you, EdgeOS being EOL since early 2020 (there was rumors of whole dev team getting booted) and don't like the hassle of installing Ubiquiti control software on a VM just for one AP.

Installation was relatively easy, however I had to first install a 3rd party complied custom OpenWRT image and then reflash the router with proper one as the new-ish OpenWRT images have a bit too big kernel image, dunno if there's any similar issues with ER-4.

SQM saves the day with ~15 Mb DSL and setup is super-easy, you should have no problem with more oomph and 300/20 connection. Router-on-a-stick should be fine though there might be some configuration differences whether ER-4's port runs DSA or swconfig. And before anyone else does it, I'll do it and ask *the* question: you must have a very good reason to make things more difficult with router-on-a-stick....

In general OpenWRT's documentation seems a bit hit and miss, but the forums are a very helpful resource, as one would expect. Good luck with your journey, IMHO the vintage ER's with metal casing (!) are still solid machines and OpenWRT extends their life cycle significantly.

 
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oneplane

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Jul 23, 2021
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A single AP can be configured from the mobile app or desktop app as well (doesn't need to be running all the time). Mostly useful if you have something that isn't EOL yet.

Otherwise, no issues on EOL'ed hardware either, mostly really old EDU hardware that still does 802.11n just fine which is plenty for the 100/100 WAN connections most of the low-usage networks have around here. Only one on an ER-X as well, and it works. I suspect that if the ER4 is just as supported as the ERX it shouldn't really be much of a difference.
 
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jjacobs

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Dec 25, 2020
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Thanks for sharing. I'll gather up my console cables (and soldering stuff in case I need to modify the cables) and head over and get it done, probably over the weekend. I'll report back.

Router on a stick, Yeah... I should just make it a flat network and have them trash the garbage IoT stuff they have. It's a vacation house and at some point they decided everything should be "internet" connected. Or maybe see if I can get that stuff to work with one of the host it yourself home automation gateway/server/thingy. Probably should just simplify...

I'm spoiled at home with my multi-layer switch (Ruckus 7150-48p) and NUC providing network services (DHCP, DNS, Radius). VYOS for WAN <-> LAN firewall and NAT on a generic little box, protectli I think. Ruckus APs. Wireless coverage is great and my wife and kids haven't complained since the Unifi stuff was booted out. It's not much compared to some of the networks I've seen here, but it just works and I have too many hobbies already.
 

XeonLab

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Aug 14, 2016
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Yeah, depending on use case and so on, HW being EOL doesn't necessary mean that things suddenly go south or you should trash perfectly fine running hardware, even when we are talking about network gear. However at this time I wanted to avoid the "Ubiquiti Experience" altogether so going all-in with OpenWRT was the obvious choice and I've been very happy with it.

Well, there's nothing wroing with quirky network setups.:D Almost always you are limited by one or multiple factors, be it premises (age-old wiring, no space to put/power even tiny gear), quirky needs ("I have 999 RasPi's to connect and a serious urge to make 8K video calls but there's only a LTE tower 10 miles away") or simply just budget/gear. On the other hand, not every deployment needs* 10G WAN, humming rack full of hardware and the whole premise littered with enterprise-grade AP's.

*I can almost feel the flamethrowers coming for writing that...
 

jjacobs

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Change of plans. Going to sell off the EdgeRouter and put in a low power x86_64 box and use VYOS. Will continue to use the Unifi AP's at this location with OpenWrt until they die or requirements demand something better. Thanks again for the insight shared! It's been a long week, going for a walk in the trees and then have a beer.

@XeonLab I don't need 10gig service. If someone does or it just makes them happy to make it all work, I think that's cool and enjoy hearing about it...
 

bleomycin

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Change of plans. Going to sell off the EdgeRouter and put in a low power x86_64 box and use VYOS. Will continue to use the Unifi AP's at this location with OpenWrt until they die or requirements demand something better. Thanks again for the insight shared! It's been a long week, going for a walk in the trees and then have a beer.

@XeonLab I don't need 10gig service. If someone does or it just makes them happy to make it all work, I think that's cool and enjoy hearing about it...
Out of curiosity what is it you liked about VYOS that you chose it on a generic x86 box over openwrt (runs on x86 I think?), pfsense/opnsense, & ipfire? Is it just familiarity and you know it'll reliably get the job done or is there more to it?
 

jjacobs

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Is it just familiarity and you know it'll reliably get the job done
Exactly. Once I made the move away from an all-in-one appliance network, the simplicity of VYOS was appealing given I'm just NATing and Firewalling packets LAN<->WAN. My experience and familiarity with EdgeOS (vyatta) made it all easy. That CLI is second nature to me.

I also build VYOS from source and run it on a box that uses coreboot (I had forgotten about that until I looked recently and did some updates). That stuff may or may not matter to you. Not sure it really matters to me, but why not...

In this case, my brother asked me Saturday morning as I was preparing to flash OpenWRT on the EdgeRouter why I used VYOS and then said tell me what to buy and show me how to get it working... I'm good with that, especially the show me part.

OpenWrt is great! Love that it can breath new life into stuff that would otherwise end up in the waste stream or on Craigslist. For a wired router I feel that VYOS or *sense makes more sense (haha). That's just me. I've always associated OpenWrt with consumer grade hardware, a way to fix/secure/repurpose the stuff you bought at BestBuy. That's what brought me here in the first place. I saw the EdgeRouter and OpenWrt as outside the normal application. Wanted to see if anyone was going to scream NO, don't do it! As mentioned above in this thread, the forum is very good.

I used and liked pfsense for years but I don't need (or want) all the functionality offered. The drama around Netgate, FreeBSD and wireguard was a factor also. I don't own a tin foil hat, but I have trust issues with Netgate. That said, the pfsense/Netgate forum is great. Ignore a few cranks and the quality of support there is excellent.

I've not used opnsense but a LOT of people love it. That says something.

It isn't all that hard (relatively speaking) to just use a Linux distro of your choosing and get that working without using a networking specific distro like VYOS or whatnot. The packages are all there, you just have work your way through manually configuring things. It's a heck of good learning experience. I've done it once, I'll not do it again.
 
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