In the networking industry there is a reliance on Silicon Valley vendors to obtain hardware and software that is easy to use and “secure”. The cost involved is steep to say the least, with some products having only “right to use” licensing.

Products from various vendors often have limited lifetime support resulting in hardware that can sometimes do nothing better than being a paper weight. Looking towards the horizon you will find open source projects such as OpenWRT.

OpenWRT is a highly customized Linux distribution used for embedded devices (eg. wireless routers). OpenWRT was designed to be full-featured, meaning if you can dream it, *you can do it.

OpenWRT is a great solution for everyone from entry level hobbyist users to networking professionals. It has both a command-line interface and a web GUI.

Your networking equipment might even be supported and you can check it here. They do have a few requirements such as a minimum of 32MB of ram for stable operation and 4MB of flash for the OpenWRT image.

OpenWRT can even be used on good old x86 PC hardware or as Virtual Machine. If you are creating a setup and need support they have comprehensive documentation.

If your hardware does not support OpenWRT but you still want to give it a shot you can buy supported hardware, there is a neat table to be found here.

OpenWRT supports networking technologies such as:

• IP addressing and routing via:
  • IPv4
  • IPv6

• Network Address Translation (NAT)
• Network Time Protocol (NTP)
• WWAN (3G/4G/LTE)
• VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks)

OpenWRT has a lot more to offer than what I have mentioned and I plan to be exploring some of it in future articles, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter if you are interested.