OpenWRT on Netgear WNDR3700v2

"Good news, everyone!"

I got my hands on a Netgear WNDR3700v2 for about $130 (which is less than Netgear advertises on their site, ha). It is a great router: 680Mhz CPU, 64 MB RAM, 16 MB Flash ROM, 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wireless and it can be fully run with Open Source Software. (The official firmware itself is a stripped down OpenWRT).

Flashing OpenWRT is really easy with this one, there's no need to use TFTP; just upload a new firmware image from the stock web interface. The trunk image for this router is 2.4 MB. After flashing, I installed ipv6 related packages, the LuCI web interface which depends uhttpd and dynamic dns related tools and I still have 87% (11.52 MB) free space. :)

Performance-wise, the router is pretty decent. It has a gigabit switch and WAN port, and two WiFi chips for 802.11n on 2.4GHz and 5Ghz. I don't have any gigabit connections on my network, so it uses up all the bandwidth without a sweat. I managed to get a maximum of 11.2 MB/s using torrent (Internet -> (WiFi) LAN), which is pretty much all my ISP can give. Quite a speedup from my old 2 MB/s on D-Link DIR-300. More benchmarks here.

Quirks and tips:

• If you don't live in the US, you might have some wireless regulatory issues:  official OpenWRT builds ignore country codes and you'll be stuck with US regulations for WiFi (channels 12, 13 and 14 not available on 2.4Ghz and potentially wrong channels on 5Ghz). More info on the wiki and here. You need to replace the stock regulatory.bin file:

#cd /usr/lib/crda
#rm regulatory.bin
#wget http://datatomb.de/mirror/stuff/regulatory.bin
#reboot

Also make sure you set the your country code.

• If you set the the router on a busy wireless channel, you'll still end up using 65 Mb/s mode. Search for busy channels with

#sudo iw wlan0 scan | grep 'primary channel:'

Also, setting  noscan=1 might help

#uci set  wireless.radio0.noscan=1

• WNDR3700v2 has 16 MB flash and it comes in a orange box. WNDR3700 (v1) has 8 MB flash and comes in a gray box. So look for a orange box. UPDATE: Apparently, nowadays they both come in a orange box.

Now... what should I do with the DIR-300?