I hope this message finds you well! I stumbled upon your channel recently and I have to say, your videos are truly informative and insightful. Your dedication to sharing knowledge and creating such valuable content is evident in every video. I noticed it's been a while since your last upload, and I just wanted to drop by and express how much I've enjoyed your content. Your videos have made a real difference for me, and I'm sure for many others as well. Life can get busy, and I completely understand if you've had other priorities recently. But I just wanted to send some positive energy your way and let you know that your work is appreciated and missed. Your unique perspective and expertise have been incredibly helpful, and I genuinely hope to see more of your wonderful videos in the future. Take care, and looking forward to whatever you have in store next!
Hi, just here to express my gratitude for your work and tell that it's the most useful channel on RU-vid for home network setup ever. All your videos are pure gold. The way you explain the material is just perfect. Please do continue, we need more of this. Hope you are well! Take care.
According to his Discord he got pretty bad COVID about mid-last year, and he had to take a break. I'm guessing it must have taken a toll :( such fantastic tutorials, shame there hasn't been any new ones for a while!
Hello Marc, I hope you are well. It is December 2023, and I can find no evidence of your presence here or on any of your other public media sites since May 2023. In this video you announced that you were planning on follow up videos. I am one of many who have learned much from your work and I hope you will return. Bob
Thank you Marc for another useful and nice video regarding the OpenWrt with Rasberry Pi. I am using Pi4 based OpnWrt router for at least the last one and a half years and I am fully satisfied with the outcome. With my setup the Pi4 is not only acting as a router rather it acts as a security gateway too by including AdGuard Home, BanIP, and many more. Earlier I used the router on stick setup with a layer 2 switch as you are presenting in the video and later I am convinced with the idea of not exposing the switch to the WAN and now using a USB3 ethernet adaptor to give a clear separation to the WAN and LAN. I recommended this to one of my friends in England in 2021 and now most of my friends and families in Europe using this setup. This makes me learn a lot about the OpenWrt on Pi4 because I am getting some questions from them from time to time. By the way, I am using the Pi router behind the Fritz!Box at the moment with the combination of the U6 mesh access points. Some of my friends use the Pi4 as a gateway for the fibre modems for DG Germany, KPN Holland, and Deutsche Telekom. Pi itself is not a good access point as you mentioned but it can act as a router with true ethernet, enough power, and capacity in conjunction with other wifi mesh systems like Unifi, tp-Link Asus, or any other wifi systems. One of my colleagues is not convinced with the USB3 ethernet adaptor idea and he bought a Pi4 computer module and the DFRobort router board with two ethernets on-board. We ran several tests and we are getting the same throughput with the SQM and packet steering. But the only notable difference is that the Pi4 with USB3 ethernet is getting 5°C warmer and uses 7-10% more processing power than the DFRobort router board. I am looking forward to your PBX server setup with OpenWrt. Keep it up Marc, I learned a lot from your videos. Thank you again.
I used Rpie 4b as router more than 3 years. Here is my experience: first of all forgot about wifi it is unusable at all, only if your house has not walls at all. Second point you will anyway will need second USB type 3 to Ethernet adapter. The third thing you will need nice gigabit manage switch. If you have all of this Rpie may the best router you can by for its price! I have 2 Gbit links for wan and 7 vlans for lab and it perform all of this very well! So my suggestion is to use it if you really want to have nice performance but have no a lot of budget. Also do not forget to enable HW flow offloading in Network->Firewall settings tab admin also you will need to enable Packet steering in the Network->Interfaces->Global network options. It will increase network performance dramatically!
One caution using an inexpensive managed switch (including the Netgear) is their firmware does not allow you to limit the Admin web control to a specific vLan, so I have found it leaking over my WAN vLan. I did find modern D-Link managed switches had this option.
Hi Tim, please see Time Marker 12:07 in the video where I do actually point this out ;-) Glas to hear that the D-Link switches do have that option - so has the Zyxel GS1200 ;-)
Marc, I have one of those, and in December 2021, I struggled a lot trying to set it up to use with pfSense. I almost gave up and bought its bigger brother, which has support from OpenWrt. I'm glad to see here that switch and another video about OpenWrt.
There are mini x86 systems with 4 to 5 LAN ports from China. They are much better suited as routers than a Raspberry PI with only one 1GB port. The LAN ports support 2.5 GB each and the x86 CPU is faster.
Hi Jens, you are absolutely right. Like I say in the video at 0:40 and 19:40 and 20:25 , the Pi has many limitations and I am not advocating this as a viable good solution.
I thoroughly enjoyed your video! For me as an untrained enthusiast you are advanced enough for me to learn something new about networking but not so advanced that I get lost.
Perfect timing. I was just pondering my next step in my migration to vlans on my network. I had a spare RPi but no managed switch. I was about to click BUY on a managed switch when I realised I could probably reuse my old WNDR3700 openWRT router. I assume I could just use the GB switch ports for this - without the wifi.
As someone who already clicked buy... twice! (first on a TP-Link SG108E, then on a Netgear GS308T) I wonder: allegedly OpenWrt runs on the Netgear GS308 (not sure yet if the E or T or another model), wouldn't it allow you to restrict access to the management interface on the VLAN(s) you want? With the "local" tick box thing in Luci.
I use a Pi4b as a router and have done for a couple of years nearly. I don't use the VLAN option, no need really albeit my 8x switch is a managed TPLink device the WAN is a USB3 Ethernet adaptor. If ound partition resizing to be simpler done off line, just use gparted on my PC.
The 5 port managed switch / rpi4 combo lasted a month before seizing up. I may return to this setup later. It is replaced by a FriendlyElec R5S for now, because it also handles sqm at 500Mbps with 20msec latency at 420Mbps. The cheap entry level managed switch I used here might be why it only lasted a month. The R5S also crashed after a few months, though.
excellent tutorial on openwrt. there are a lot of cheap home routers with multiple ports that are compatible with openwrt firmware. much easier to come by than raspberry pi at the moment.
Totally agree. I do however want to show a use case in a future video where it could make sense to use the Pi (if you have no other use for it) by using it as a phone tethering gateway for WAN failover on a dedicated VLAN
@@OneMarcFifty It's actually a great way for learning VLANs given limited available resources. As for the phone tethering, I've been using it for years. A dedicated router is a better choice performance wise. Where the PI shines is when you power it on battery. Mark, did you know that ipheth (the iPhone driver) has an issue? If you connect the iPhone to a Mac it changes modes. Then connect to OpenWRT and it won't work until you reboot the phone. I have a patch that adds CDC NCM support and resolves that.
I've been trying to get a setup like this to work at my home lab and I still couldn't figure it out 😭 Thanks Marc for this updated guide! I have the exact equipment on this tutorial so I'll try this out over the next few days
@@OneMarcFifty Hi Marc! I got it working, VLANs and all. I don't know if you already posted something like it, but do you think you can post about docker on openwrt? That bums me because I couldn't get it to work, and I wanted to host a VPN server on the router as well.
Just found your channel - really appreciate the clarity of how you present information. Please consider doing a video on installing OpenWRT on to older x86 hardware. For example, I'm sure lots of people like myself have an old PC which - with the addition of a cheap four port gigabit NIC in the PCIe slot - becomes a very capable router while keeping old hardware out of landfill. The one I have is now about 10 years old (Haswell era ITX H87N-wifi which has one Intel and one Atheros gigabit port) and I plan on playing around with OpenWRT, OPNsense and pfSense over the next few weeks. I like the idea of OpenWRT because. . . Linux :) The router I actually use, an Asus RT-AC86U has asuswrt-merlin installed and it's very solid, but I can't play around with settings without risking seriously annoying my family when they lose internet access !
Most cheap home wifi routers only have one ethernet interface anyway, so this method is replicating that. A Lot of tp link wifi routers will have the wan port as eth0.2 and of course the native vlan as 0.1. Like Marc said, you need the switch gui/console on it's own network / vlan.
Nice tutorial. I set this up as a Proxmox container using the single NIC based on your video. It works great except it won't issue a DHCP address to my laptop. If I hard code the IP on the laptop it works perfectly to connect to the OpenWRt web server on the LAN interface. I just can't get DHCP to work on subinterface. Anyone else have this problem?
That's odd, normally you can just run resize2fs without doing any loopback stuff. You don't even have to reboot. But I guess maybe they didn't compile support for that to save space
Oh - I will have to test that. I had tested it once a long time ago and got an error, then made a mental note to myself that I had to use loopback. But maybe that has changed or my test at the time was wrong. I‘ll give it another try- thanks for the feedback
Is this the same way, connecting a Pi to a managed switch, which should be used for OpenMTPCRouter? On their homepage there is no detailed information about how the wiring is..
Hello, I appreciate your kind words. I really need your help due to the place I live in. I have a Mini PC N5095 with OpenWrt installed on it. It has three WAN ports, each connected to a separate internet link, and one LAN port and one Wi-Fi. My request to you is to create a tutorial video for the scenario I'm about to describe, so that both I and others facing the same issue can benefit from it. I would like to set up OpenVPN on each of the WAN ports and configure load balancing and failover between these three OpenVPN connections, so that I can utilize the combined bandwidth of these three connections on the LAN and Wi-Fi. Additionally, I want the scenario to include a kill switch, DNS leak protection, and an ad blocker. Thank you in advance for your assistance.
As mentioned in the vid: There are so many better options than RP for doing a SBC router. RP is just... Not there for starters with the single ethernet port. And now its so expensive.
Great Channel. One thing to watch out for managment switches and security is that the management interface could be exposed on port that are not specificed in the managment gui/cli. TP.-Link had some security issues for example. Access to managment interface via WAN port for example could be very bad.
Hi Marc! I appreciate your videos - they've been really helpful! I'm facing an issue reaching my PI and its associated services via IPv4 due to my DSLite connection. At home, my setup is TAE > Fritzbox (used solely as a modem) > OpenWRT > Pi (hosting services like NextCloud/Vaultwarden, etc.). The challenge arises when my mobile phone only has an IPv4 connection without IPv6. This prevents me from accessing my home network. I'm wondering if it's possible to use a VPS (I have one running Linux, specifically Ubuntu) to facilitate access to my home network through the OpenWRT router.
If you're building a router, then you'll need something with, at least, dual NICs... One for the WAN interface. I wouldn't trust my network to VLAN. It's possible to circumvent that.
PLEASE 🥺make a video on making an unsupported router be officially supported or a step by step how to port openwrt to a totally unsupported router so that a lot can add more routers with openwrt support.
Sir, i have a question.Please Answer. i am using openwrt 22.03.5 on tp link archer c60. it has only 8mb flash memory. after Installing openwrt only 840kb space left. now i have noticed, if i reboot the router from luci storage space reduces. if this continues i may run out of space near future. is it normal?
I have tried several times, and I absolutely cannot get this to work. When I apply the changes in LUCI, I lose comms to the web interface and cannot get it back. Happens every time. There is nothing in the guide about where to plug stuff in or how the VLANs relate to subnets. Assuming we start with VLAN1 on all the managed switch ports, and the Pi listening on 192.168.1.1/24, does that mean that both VLAN1 and VLAN 99 are used with that same subnet? Am I expecting the Pi or managed switch to provide an IP address to the mgmt laptop via DHCP, or should I have a static IP allocated? Can you please clarify??
Hi Marc, Is there no way this can be done without the switch? If the Pi gets an additional NIC via USB, then.... oh, we still need the Switch to distribute to the LAN....
Thanks Marc, very nice. Regarding disabling WAN access to the web i/f for the switch you can disable DHCP mode (on a Netgear managed switch) and set a static IP address which is on the LAN i/f. Haven't tried it yet but I think that should secure the device, what do you think?
This did not work for me at all. As soon as I define the vlan in the switch, it breaks and I can no longer access the NUC to configure vlan in the nuc, or the internet for that matter. using an SG108E
They've gone end-of-life and I think all the remaining stock is being sold in the US. You may be able to find the black one - Linksys E8450 - in EU, but the Belkin only appears to be available here (US$49 at Walmart for the past month or two).
Difficult to get at the moment. Maybe look for the Linksys e8450 (identical) or for the xiaomi ax3200 which is approximately the same hardware but difficult to flash openwrt.org/toh/xiaomi/ax3200
hi @OneMarcFifty, great video. For this particular setup, possible to have the rpi4 running in pi os, running docker container openwrt and pihole image, and set it up to a switch like in this video with the help of docker bridge network ? not sure if it make sense..
@@OneMarcFifty it was going great, but i use jellyfin as a media server. and everyone in my house uses it. i couldnt able to access it with local ip. but i was being able to access it with public ip while being inside the lan. there was something going in l2 switching. i really dont have time right to learn about it right now, so i discarded the whole system, because not being able to access media server is a deal breaker for me.
Hi, in the "traditional" mode, i.e. VLAN on the interface, you would tag/untag packets on the interface and then potentially bridge the interfaces. But you can still do that with DSA. The real change is not so much DSA but rather Bridge VLAN filtering, where you bridge all interfaces and then tag the packets on the bridge.
I feel VLAN configuration in OpenWRT version 21+ à la DSA (ie. without the Switch tab on LuCI) got a bit unintuitive. For example if you used OpenWRT on the managed switch too instead of this Netgear device and it's own software, you'd probably define a br-lan device with VLAN 99 and 1000 both tagged on port 6 similar how you did at 8:20. That would mean OpenWRT would implicitly create two VLAN (802.1q) devices for those 2 VLANs ie. br-lan.99 and br-lan.1000. Now when you'd create a lan interface in OpenWRT for those 2 VLANs, you would need to select one of the existing devices br-lan.99 or br-lan.1000. Whichever you choose there will be 2 tagged VLANs on this lan interface, but when you look at the lan interface config it will say it's based on either br-lan.99 or br-lan.1000.
Just 2 quick questions, please: 1. At 9:42 - why create the VLAN(s) on br-lan when eth0 is also available? I feel I'm missing something here, I just can't figure out what 2. Where do you find Netgear GS308E at US$27 and Belkin RT 3200 at US$80?
Hi Dan, there are multiple ways to do VLANs under Linux (and hence OpenWrt.) Either with Bridge VLAN filtering (like I show) or on the NEtwork adapter directly (like you suggest) and potentially add the already tagged interface to a bridge. Which mechanism you chose depends basically on the use case or on your personal preference. W/r to your second question - in the video I just browsed to Amazon. But prices and availability most probably depend on your country of residence.
@@OneMarcFifty Thanks for your answer Marc! I found your channel when looking for info on how to configure VLANs on OpenWrt and I have to say the first video was very clear... that was until I watched the second one! (i.e. the one for OpenWrt 21, with DSA) The second one confused me so much that I had to rewatch it a few times, just to make sure I get it right, in contrast with the first one. And to be honest, I still don't really understand why in previous OpenWrt versions VLANs were set up using the "real" Ethernet device/adapter, while in version 21 and later it's done using VLAN filtering on bridges. I accept that this is how it's done :), however I would really love to also understand why, i.e. what actually drove this change and what advantages and disadvantages it brought. I wonder if VLAN filtering would be more "efficient" somehow? In the sense of more tightly controlling (at the bridge level) where each tagged packet is sent? I'm purely guessing here. Also, I really wonder if there could be any kind of "cross talk" between the different VLANs before OpenWrt completes the boot process - e.g. if the built-in switch has 4 ports and each of them would be configured as untagged, with a different PVID - would the 4 devices (e.g. computers) attached to those ports be able to "see" each other, even for a (very) brief period while OpenWrt is booting? (assuming that the network addresses and netmasks would allow it). I said I should/would test this, I just didn't find the time to set it up yet. If packets can "leak" between VLANs before the router completes the boot process it would be quite bad. I hoped to get to ask you about the above points (and a few other OpenWrt things) on one of your Discord sessions but I've always missed those Sunday slots :( To complicate things a bit more, after I watched your videos a few times I bought a new router and I installed OpenWrt 22.03.5 on it, fully expecting it to use DSA and VLAN filtering, only to find out that it still uses the old switch configuration method and VLAN setup (!) So all that effort of trying to understand the differences was not actually needed for my router of choice :) On the switch configuration page I can see both CPU0 and CPU1 and I'm not sure how to setup tagging to get it right - should I work with the assumption that CPU0 corresponds to eth0 and CPU1 to eth1, or is it something completely different? Thanks against for the videos and your answer! (BTW, my second initial question was just a silly joke - I buy from UK and I've never seen those low prices! Only last month I paid the equivalent of some €50 for the Netgear GS308T)
Hi Marc for this great video. You are my go-to source for anything OpenWRT. On your comment on security I was thinking. Why not have the LAN traffic as untagged to the Raspberrypi and have only the WAN traffic tagged? In that way, the switch DHCP and management interface would be on an untagged port and thus not exposed to the internet. I am trying to get a similar setup with a FriendlyARM NanoPi R2S. I plan to use vlans for my guest and IOT networks but leave my lan untagged. As I understood the documentation from Openwrt you can actually do that. update: just configured my switch and R2S as i described and this works!!! Would appreciate your thoughts on this approach....
The advantages of Squashfs include compression, read-only access, and data integrity, while the advantages of ext4 include read-write access, performance, and compatibility.
Thank you very much for your really impressive work, I have a piece of advice to ask you, I own a xiaomi 4A router version 100mbits which already runs on openwrt however it is quite limited on the ram and cpu side, I own a raspberry pi 3B+ that I bought second-hand for less than 10 euros, the question: I can gain in wifi power quality by combining the two openwrt on pi 3 and use the router which itself runs on openwrt as a wifi repeater vu que j ai les composants ? Y a t il des risques de pertes de performances ?
It would be nice if the managed switch would/could also run OpenWRT (one type of software to learn configuring, frequent updates, etc.). @OneMarcFifty, do you have experience running switches with OpenWRT and can you recommend brands/types of switches which are available in Europe?
Hi Remy, basically you could use any old OpenWrt capable Router that has multiple Ethernet ports. If you browse through my older videos, I did this with an old Router already. I have been using an old Archer C7 for this for a long time.
@@OneMarcFifty understood. I am looking for a more ‘pro-ish’ kind of switch setup. 8+ ports, PoE, multiple ports running at line speed, that sort of stuff. Proper switch hardware that is able to run open source software. I know the OpenWRT hcl contains some switches, but they are either hard to get, running OpenWRT snapshot (which I consider unstable) or they have some quirks.
Ok, I see. I have never tried. Also-checking the OpenWrt forums, it looks like there is some support for the RTL838x chipset (like the zyxel gs1900) forum.openwrt.org/t/support-for-rtl838x-based-managed-switches/57875 but the chipset does not seem to be well documented. Also, the flashing process is not really well documented. You would need to find a switch with a very well supported hardware platform, but I am not aware of any…
In luci network-->interfaces-->devices-->configure inside the "Bridge VLAN filtering" tab the tags now say just "Untagged" and "Tagged" (instead Egress...) And is not a t or u, is a T and U. Is that a general change? Does it do the same?
This video is very confusing and almost got me very scared about using fdisk. You installed a squashfs image and then ended up using a procedure meant for ext4 fs to growfs, it failed, but you did not point out the fact that you made a mistake. This would make someone to doubt the documentation. I have never used the squashfs image so this was my first time using it on RPi. Turns out the process is very easy: After writing the changes, you just need to reboot, then run 'resize2fs /dev/loop0' and voila. I suggest and edit 🙂
Hi Odhiambo, many thanks for your feedback. Actually I did not install squashfs on this system but rather ext4. Should have pointed this out maybe in the beginning. So I did use the right procedure (check time marker 17:37 - it shows an ext4 signature!). Now - with regards to the documentation - there is absolutely no reason to doubt in it, it works very well if you apply it in the right way. I had no intention to mislead anybody in thinking this could be erroneous. Where I did make a mistake was that I copy pasted all the commands even though the blog entry says explicitly to not do so. Many thanks for pointing this out - I did not pay attention to that. However - I find it a bit harsh (not to say unfair) to say that the whole video is confusing just because one screen cam/comment in the fine tuning section at the end of the video might be ambiguous. I mean, the video is mainly about dispatching VLANs to multiple Ethernet ports on a switch, not on increasing the file system using fdisk and resize2fs. Even though I watch my videos 3-4 times before I publish them in order to eliminate errors, they may still happen as I am only human after all ;-) Anyhow - thanks for your feedback, much appreciated!
Your dd command showed you using the squashfs image, which makes it even more complicated. However, I did pick one nice lesson - about the ability to have the 'reset' in the squashfs image as opposed to the ext4 image. And I'll still have more to learn about vlans.
Hi Eugene, I am afraid that there will not be any video on Asterisk in the near future ;-( - I will rather have a look at phone tethering, i.e. use a mobile phone to provide fail over whenever your internet connection goes down. On an OpenWrt router, YATE is a great alternative (much more lightweight, but badly documented though...)
Hello everything is fine? very good your video. I already did this procedure on a Rassary-pi 4 8gb of ram. it turned out really good. I also did this procedure on a babana-pi mt7622 router. it was fine, but with openwrt I couldn't make the integrated wi-fi or the video HDMI interface work.
Hi marc your channl is awsome you always have the best content just when it seems like you might be running out of topics you manage to come up with another grate viedo. Could you make a viedo on installing openwrt on an android os if thats possible. I have an older android tv box i would like to install openwrt on. It stopped updating at android 4.4 and has 2g and 5g wifi so i figured that it might be a good thing to repurpose as a openwrt router. Thanks keep up the grate content.
Hallo, gibt es eine Lösung um eine "Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200" Wlan Karte auf einem x86 System zu aktivieren? (atueller Snapshot und im Ordner Firmware liegt der ......77.ucode) Kernel-Treiber sind geladen und der "iwlwifi-AX200" auch. Es tut sich trotzdem nichts. Der "Empfang" geht, es werden Wlan angezeigt, aber es kommt keine Verbindung zustande. Ich folgere das die Karte nicht sendet. Danke und Grüße
Hi, many thanks for the feedback. Yes, using an old OpenWrt Router is a viable alternative. Most routers only have 5 ports though. But I have used an old Archer C7 like this for a long time.
It would be interesting to see what speeds you can achieve with phone tethering, given the phone and router are powerful enough and the signal is good. My record was 66 GB in one hour using iPhone 7 Plus and LTE, WRT3200ACM. 700 GB in one month. Are the mobile plans in Germany suitable for my use case? 📲
My man what's up? Marc, I want you to make video on proxmox having containers like portainer or docker pi-hole true-nas jellyfin like building one machine that can do anything like sky is a limit. Pls respond I want you to make this video, it will be a guide for us beginners to make a home server which can do a lot of things.
The installation was demonstrated with the squashfs image, how could the card be resized with ext4 fs? How do I size my installation's squashfs partition? Grateful.
