Moving Mango to OpenWRT

Router
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I love my Beryl AX in no small part because of the policy based routing in 4.8.3 of the firmware. But often I prefer the size, albeit more modest capabilities, of the Mango, which is still at the 4.3 level of the firmware. So I thought I would report on moving Mango to vanilla OpenWRT. to replicate that.

If there is interest I will do a more detailed writeup, but I thought I would point out a few things.

I installed 25.12.1 (the current OpenWRT version), which includes an integrated imagebuilder that works really well. I installed wireguard, travelmate and pbr for the core travel router needs, and also nano and adblock. Deleted ppp but kept ipv6. Then rebuilt the firmware so I had a compact, slimmed down version.

I didn't install openvpn, although 25.12 allows dco and might be as capable as wireguard, but I've kind of moved on. I have about 9mb of room left for apps.

Two things had me tearing my hair out. One is that pbr is hard-coded to require a wan interface to start. You have to manually edit the .conf file to change the uplink interface to wwan or trm_wwan to get it to start. The other was a difficult time having both wireguard interfaces operating well; that turned out to be a server side allowed-ip problem. It does take time for the scripts to settle down.

I'm seeing speedtest.net tests of between 12/12 and 17/20 for throughput from a laptop connected over wifi to the Mango, with the Mango uplinked to a wifi hotspot provided by a cell phone transatlantically to a capable Wireguard server. (Hard test, right?) But the Mango is not being maxed out, so these speeds are likely limited by things other than the Mango.

I know now a lot more about OpenWRT and its awesome flexibility, but man, the Gl-Inet GUI is so much easier to deal with.

EDIT: For a lark, I hooked up a Beryl MT1300 (so, dual-core 7621, slightly higher clock speed) with stock 4.3.25 on the same 2.4 band, and got speedtest results of about 30/20 over the same hotspot to the same wireguard server and the same result not using wireguard. About 50/30 using 2.4 band for the uplink and 5 for the laptop. So the Beryl on stock maxes out the connection at 30/20 that produces 12-17 up and 12-20 down on the single core 7628n with the current Openwrt.

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I agree with you that support for the older routers running the 4.x firmware has been poor, to the point that these routers are almost unusable. The newer GL iNet models that run the latest firmware look nice, but the company has made a real mess of the 4.x rollout. Depending on which “supported” router you own, your current production firmware might be 4.3.x, 4.5.x, 4.7.x, or 4.8.x.

I have several AR300M/M16 routers, plus a Creta, running OpenWrt 24.10.x. I mainly use them as VPN servers. It is great that the base OpenWrt install is small enough that I can configure a full multi‑protocol VPN server supporting WireGuard and SoftEther in a tiny device that only draws a few watts. Family members and friends love them, as they are great to use to route back home for streaming and when they need local IP addresses.

SoftEther is an excellent Open Source VPN server that far too few people use. Its native stealth protocol, which looks like normal HTTPS traffic, has saved me multiple times when other protocols have been blocked. It also emulates OpenVPN, L2TP/IPsec, and MS‑SSTP servers, all on the same port.

The hard part was getting the first router converted to OpenWrt. It took me months of experimenting while I was traveling around the world.

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What do you expect, It's a 7-10 year old router. . . Be happy it has v4. Each device should be EOL after 3-4 years max. Just like most cell phones.

And each router should only get 1 major release, that's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

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you forgot the /s

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Hi

Thank you for sharing your experience using vanilla OpenWRT on the Mango, and for your appreciation of the GL.iNet WebUI.

Due to Mango’s hardware limitations, we may not be able to provide a v4.8 update for it.
However, we are currently planning to release the next-generation successor to the Mango (we noticed your comment in the post), so perhaps you can look forward to that.

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Samsung and Google now offer seven years of Android updates on their phones, and Apple averages about the same with iOS. I could easily live with seven years of support from GL iNet if they would commit to it in writing.

Right now there is no consistency at all. Some routers get long support, others get cut short, and even the models that are still supported often run firmware with far fewer features than the newer models. It is completely unpredictable and unmanageable.

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I follow that the firmware is at different levels even for supported models, but I'm not sure I want all the models to be at the same level. Yes, I have a Beryl AX and Mudi 750 on 4.8, and a Mango and Beryl still on 4.3. But I'm not interested in zerotier or tailscale or goodcloud or NAS features or AdGuard Home on the Mango; for my use case I am interested in multiple tunnels and pbr, So I'm more interested in deleting features from 4.8 than adding them onto the Mango. I follow that different devices have different hardware limitations that may prevent more recent features, but I can see a case for newer basic firmware with the GL-iNet GUI with variations in what is in the image and what can be added via Luci. I'm actually impressed with the hardware capabilities of the Mango.

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