I think my network router might be starting to fail.. I've had it
for almost 6 years, and recently I've noticed it will sometimes
disconnect from the internet, so none of my devices have internet
access. If I power-cycle the router, then I'm back on the internet
and all is good.
It's a Netgear Nighthawk R7800 that I bought around July 2020. I was
running DD-WRT on it, which I had installed right after I bought it
(and I had flashed a few newer versions of DD-WRT since then too).
All was working fine until the last few weeks.
Yesterday, I decided to replace DD-WRT with OpenWrt on the router; I
was curious if it might be more stable for now, but I'm not entirely
sure it will help at all. It's been about 20 hours since I installed OpenWrt, and so far so good, though I think more time will tell if it
will disconnect any time soon.
I got all my forwarded ports & static DHCP leases configured in
OpenWrt, so it's set up as before. And I specified port forwarding
with ipv4 IP addresses, as before. I've noticed that this OpenWrt
supports both ipv4 and ipv6, which I suppose is a good thing. Also,
one thing I want to look into now is ad blocking with OpenWrt.
The only problem with blocking ads with OpenWRT is that you have no option to easily disable the blocker unless you either whitelist a website or turn it off. It turned out more trouble than it was worth than using a browser based ad blocker.
As far as OpenWRT goes in general, I've been using it a long time and never had any real problems other than my router getting overloaded when using i2p. I ended up buying an OpenWRT One router. They're a little pricey now, I was them for $125 but they've got everything you need including an M2 slot onboard, easy recovery, dual band wifi and the rest.
Re: Re: Router: Moved from DD-WRT to OpenWrt
By: Nigel Reed to Nightfox on Sun Mar 08 2026 08:59 pm
As far as OpenWRT goes in general, I've been using it a long
time and never had any real problems other than my router
getting overloaded when using i2p. I ended up buying an OpenWRT
One router. They're a little pricey now, I was them for $125 but
they've got everything you need including an M2 slot onboard,
easy recovery, dual band wifi and the rest.
It's good to know OpenWRT is generally good. I've seen other people
online say that as well. I probably should have started using
OpenWRT sooner..
Nightfox
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
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Nightfox wrote to All <=-
supports both ipv4 and ipv6, which I suppose is a good thing. Also,
one thing I want to look into now is ad blocking with OpenWrt.
Nigel Reed wrote to Nightfox <=-
The only problem with blocking ads with OpenWRT is that you have no
option to easily disable the blocker unless you either whitelist a
website or turn it off. It turned out more trouble than it was worth
than using a browser based ad blocker.
As far as OpenWRT goes in general, I've been using it a long time and never had any real problems other than my router getting overloaded
when using i2p. I ended up buying an OpenWRT One router. They're a
little pricey now, I was them for $125 but they've got everything you
need including an M2 slot onboard, easy recovery, dual band wifi and
the rest.
There is an adblock and another one called adblock-fast package, I tried adblock-fast and it crashed dnsmasq. I didn't have time to look into it, so I restored it from backup. I'll try again tonight.
Providing blocking on non-PCs is nice, too. When I watch Hulu with my
local ad-blocker, I don't get the commercial breaks. On my Roku devices,
I get the usual commercial breaks. I'd like to have the same experience
on all of the devices in my network.
I was using a Synology 2600AC and loved the features - time of day
controls for the kids, a really easy to use VPN, stateful firewall that inspected packets. It all came at a cost, though. My internet speeds
were 400/10. With an older Linksys WRT1900AC and OpenWRT, my speeds
jumped to 600/40. I need every bit of that upload speed as I work from
home and have to upload files to my office frequently.
It's a Netgear Nighthawk R7800 that I bought around July 2020. I was
It's a Netgear Nighthawk R7800 that I bought around July 2020. I was
I have the same router and is working fine. Have you looked into PiHole? I've been running that for years as my adblocker/dns servers (with unbound) for about 4 - 5 years now and it works great!
router itself to block ads. Though now that I think about it, I'm wondering if you can run PiHole directly on the router with OpenWrt? If so, do you think that would be too much of a workload for the router to handle and not overheat etc.?
| Sysop: | Tetrazocine |
|---|---|
| Location: | Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
| Users: | 15 |
| Nodes: | 8 (0 / 8) |
| Uptime: | 120:48:07 |
| Calls: | 208 |
| Files: | 21,502 |
| Messages: | 82,207 |