Comments on: Asuswrt-Merlin vs DD-WRT

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 19:43:53 +0000

In reply to greenshirtman. The settings may carry over but I wouldn't count on it. I would suggest you go through your existing router configuration and take screenshots of each section, then upgrade and re-enter. Give yourself a little time but I don't think it will take 2 hours to redo.

By: greenshirtman

greenshirtman — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 18:20:06 +0000

Good review. Thinking about installing it, but I just spend 2 hours configuring home network with default setup, I’m afraid I might have to re-do it if I upgrade to Asuswrt-

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 25 May 2017 18:13:12 +0000

In reply to Kadigan. Sorry this comment got caught in a spam trap. Thank you very much for the comment, it's very helpful.

By: Kadigan

Kadigan — Wed, 10 May 2017 16:50:12 +0000

“Asuswrt-Merlin does have one capability that DD-WRT lacks. You can configure it to allow you to plug in two ISP uplinks and load balance them or use one for backup.”

Technically you can hook up as many ISP uplinks as you have ports, minus one if you actually want to use them — vlans can be set up that separate each physical port into its own vlan (in fact, many WAN interfaces are just the 6th port of the switch, assigned to WAN via a vlan). This will give you vlan{X} interfaces you can manage via SSH (vlan0 to vlan15 I believe), and you can specify iptables rules for forwarding between them. Yes, you can specify dhcpd/dnsmasq options for which interface should have DHCP and DNS listening, etc.

Routing between them may not be automatic, but you can always write a script which will prioritize one over the other, test conditions, alter the routing table accordingly etc.

Granted, this isn’t easily exposed via the WebUI.

By: Tom G.

Tom G. — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 16:37:51 +0000

One thing I do like DD-WRT for is setting up a guest access point. I use a separate Wi-Fi router for my guest network, and then set Open DNS’ family filtering DNS servers up on it. I then block any outgoing requests for DNS from the LAN to the WAN via a firewall rule. By only allowing access to the DNS socket on the router, I prevent any guest from using a DNS server other than what I want. This might be a bit of an overkill for most, but by using the family filtering DNS servers from Open DNS I can help block a lot of unsafe sites that guest may either accidentally visit or intentionally visit.