Any known firmware alternative for gl router hardware?

Henry_Bruns · 2021-05-23T09:46:54.259Z

Does anyone know alternative firmware projects, from which can used firmware for gl router hardware ?

sammo · 2021-05-23T10:38:04.158Z

Depends on the device being supported. The mainstream are openwrt, ddwrt

https://alternativeto.net/software/openwrt/

Henry_Bruns · 2021-05-23T15:11:59.507Z

sammo:

Depends on the device being supported. The mainstream are openwrt, ddwrt

Yes. Most of GL firmware are on top of openwrt and can get from openwrt website. [OpenWrt Wiki] GL.inet
DDWRT support would be great, are it looks for me on this time, its supported by not so many gll devices. DD-WRT for GL.iNet router like GL-AR300M or GL-AR750?

Any other firmware projects which can used for gl hardware or a time frame for DDWRT or Tomato support of gl devices ?

sammo · 2021-05-23T15:29:50.040Z

Is there any reason why you don’t want to use openwrt?
Do you have a use case?

Henry_Bruns · 2021-05-24T00:28:25.091Z

If I remember right, is the openwrt firmware not realy easy to configure.

eric · 2021-05-24T01:56:42.318Z

It takes a bit of time to figure out OpenWrt, but as it uses the same LUCI interface that GL iNet gives you in the advanced menu, many GL iNet users already have some level of experience with the OpenWrt interface. The nice thing about OpenWrt is it does not assume it knows the hardware config of the router. The GL iNet firmware is written for specific hardware configurations and it does not always handle new hardware. As an example, adding a USB WIFI adapter to a GL iNet router can cause the GL iNet firmware to do really stupid things, like wipe out your WIFI configuration. With OpenWrt it is relatively easy to add or change hardware.

I am now very comfortable using 19.07.7 OpenWrt firmware on my GL iNet routers and I highly recommend it as a replacement for GL iNet firmware, especially if you want fast security fixes, the ability to customize your router, and you want something that is not full of bloat. I am just waiting for the production release of OpenWrt 21.02 firmware, as that version will support the NAND storage on my AR300M and AR750S routers.

sammo · 2021-05-24T05:53:02.777Z

@Henry_Bruns There will always be a learning curve with any alternatives. There are alot of resources and help available on the openwrt forum.

@eric I’m running 21.02rc1 on both ar300m and ar750. Ar750s have been rejected due to not standard kernel size. Gl inet are looking to resubmit a revision

Henry_Bruns · 2021-05-24T08:35:16.054Z

sammo:

There will always be a learning curve with any alternatives. There are alot of resources and help available on the openwrt forum.

Its looks like a good startpoint for Openwrt related researces are: [OpenWrt Wiki] User guide

eric:

I am now very comfortable using 19.07.7 OpenWrt firmware on my GL iNet routers and I highly recommend it as a replacement for GL iNet firmware, especially if you want fast security fixes,

How to configure DNS, VPN and a Killswitch by Openwrt ? Does it need to install additional addons or how to do ?

sammo · 2021-05-24T10:37:09.086Z

@Henry_Bruns

How to configure DNS, VPN and a Killswitch by Openwrt ? Does it need to install additional addons or how to do

I suggest you create 2 AP, one passthough, one vpn.
This will simplify the operation with captive port authenication/vpn killswitch/dns leak etc Look up policy based routing and guest (VPN) network configuration.

eric · 2021-05-24T13:42:49.254Z

My preferred VPN is SoftEther which is one of the reasons for using OpenWrt, as there is not enough room in 16MB of flash to add SoftEther to the GL iNet firmware, but I have no problems fitting SoftEther, OpenVPN and Wireguard on my AR300M16 using OpenWrt 19.07.7. My kill switch for SoftEther, which would probably work for OpenVPN, as it uses the TUN device for its interface, is to setup the following two iptable rules:

iptables -w -I FORWARD -i br+ -o eth0  -j REJECT
iptables -w -I FORWARD -i br+ -o wlan0 -j REJECT

These rules keep any packets from being able to be forwarded to the wan or wwan interfaces. The packets can only be forwarded to my SoftEther interface.

For DNS I am using the stubby package along with dnsmasq to force my DNS to go to Cloudflare over TLS. When I am also using SoftEther, my DNS requests are sent over SoftEther, so the Cloudflare DNS server selected is near my SoftEther server. I also add to /etc /firewall.user the rules:

iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i br+  -p udp -m udp  --dport 53 -j DNAT --to 192.168.1.1:53
iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i br+  -p tcp -m tcp  --dport 53 -j DNAT --to 192.168.1.1:53

Which forces all router clients to use the router DNS, and not some other DNS address. I have disable IPv6 on my router.

sammo · 2021-05-24T17:02:21.171Z

You can also setup the redirect using below in the firewall file

config redirect
option name ‘Divert LAN DNS’
option src ‘lan’
option proto ‘tcpudp’
option src_dport ‘53’
option dest_port ‘53’
option target ‘DNAT’

The default rules is to drop, you can sentup the forwarding rule also

config forwarding
option src lan
option dest tun_zone

NetJay33 · 2021-06-09T20:14:28.195Z

Looking to run a vanilla OpenWRT firmware to replace the GL version of OpenWRT. However, not all GL products are listed on the OpenWRT pages as supported. How can I install a vanilla OpenWRT on GL devices not listed on the supported devices page?

Particularly referring to GL-X300B model, which shares very similar spec (albeit without Wifi) compared to GL-X750V2 (which is listed on OpenWRT as a supported device). Would the GL-X750V2 image work on the GL-X300B?

Any feedback is much appreciated.

alzhao · 2021-06-10T07:39:42.415Z

You need to wait until the patches is submitted and accepted by openwrt.

NetJay33 · 2021-06-10T12:32:23.488Z

Ok, but I was referring to replacing the OpenWRT version provided by GL.inet with the official one from the OpenWRT site (i.e. doing a clean install, but replacing it with “stock/vanilla” OpenWRT.

Some devices are listed as supported on the OpenWRT page, so that wouldn’t be an issue, but I was wondering how would I go about it for those which are not explicitly listed on the list of supported hardware?

alzhao · 2021-06-15T04:41:09.513Z

Yes that is what I have said.

We submit patches to openwrt and they have to accept that. Then you will find openwrt vanilla firmware for the models.