Welcome OpenWRT!

Ever since I started to seriously learn about networking (about maybe 3 years ago by now), I felt that there should, at some point, come a day where I stop using the box that my ISP provided us with for routing, firewall and the likes.

I’ve wanted something that I can have a much finer degree of control with. So… after a very long time debating what I should actually go for, I recently made the decision to go and buy a TP-Link Archer C7 v5 WLAN router, second-hand for about 35€, with OpenWRT already installed.

My days are long enough at the moment that I didn’t want to spend time on flashing a router myself so I jumped at the occasion when I saw it.

It took me about 1h to get it all running with minimal settings (2.4 and 5 GHz wifi networks and SSH access) and I have to admit that I have absolutely so regrets about having made that decision.

I now can push routes to my docker containers, set-up DNS and the firewall from the router and that’s just mot something I could have done before. Granted, I’m not running anything enterprise-grade from my apartment but it still feels great to geek out with it.

I even set up Docker containers with Prometheus and Grafana to be able to monitor the router on my Raspberry Pi 4B!

When in doubt, just go for a self-managed router like me. If you’re a geek, you won’t regret it!