GL-AR750S first impressions and development help

Hi there,
My GL-Inet AR750S Slate arrived and I started playing with it. Overall I’m very satisfied.

However, I noticed a few points that require guidance/clarification.

1 - The stock web configuration interface is well polished and looks astonishing both in the browser and mobile. However, it seems not to follow the LuCi standard. I understand that is an ongoing work and therefore not all features are available yet (such as, support for different types of VPN other than openvpn) but what worries me is that there seems to have different configuration files, which are not recognized by LuCi once installed the luci-openvpn module.

2 - lack of API usage. I learn that most features in lucy are configured with “uci tool” which allow for creating a number of different interfaces while keeping the consistency of configuration standard across them. the javascript that configures OpenVPN for the new interface doesn’t seem to be using it.

3 - lack of backup. It would be nice to have a way to backup configurations in case of firmware reinstall.

4 - development guide. If you guys would like to build a community, it would be nice to provide some initial guides for development. The information I’ve found is scattered in many places and doesn’t seem to be specific to slate. A proper forum room and a slack channel can help. Please favor commenting the code in English. I’m not native myself but is harder for me to read the comments in Chinese.

5 - channel to post feature requests. There are a ton of things I would like slate to have and I’m willing to contribute. For instance, It would be nice to have VPN for one of the wireless networks, and when active make the let blink in a different color… things like that. right now this forum seems to be very cluttered and is hard to find useful information.

Thanks for the great piece of hardware guys. Loving it so far.

1 Like
  1. You can do backup via Luci.
  2. Docs for v3 are being worked on.
  3. There is here: Feature Request Thread For Firmware v3

John,
Will the backup work for the opvn files uploaded with the new interface that are stored in non standard location?
Thanks

Yes all files related to the GL user interface will be backed up including openvpn.

In the off chance that it misses a file, you can set extra files to back up here:

System > Backup/Flash Firmware > Configuration

You can check using 7zip if the files were included in the backup file.

I just received my ar-750s and was looking at the gl site for an openwrt 18.06.1-based firmware. The current release seems to be based on openwrt 17. Looking on the openwrt website there is not an ar-750s (only ar750) for 18.06.1 release but in the development snapshots download there is a current version for the ar-750s here https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/ar71xx/generic/

My question is whether using the standard openwrt firmware as opposed to the release v3 on the GL site has any disadvantages? For example with stability or buttons etc. Realizing of course that a development snapshot may not be the most stable anyway!

You can download the latest firmware for the AR750s here:
http://download.gl-inet.com/firmware/ar750s/release/

All the v3 firmwares are based on openwrt 18.06.

Running the GL firmware is required if you want support for your router :slight_smile:

Understood. Thanks :wink:

My AR750S arrived yesterday. Great device. The v3 interface is miles better than v2. Will try some VPN when I go out of town with it this weekend.