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Why Asuswrt-Merlin is the Best!

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Lynx

Senior Member
I would just like to share why having played around with the Asuswrt-Merlin firmware for some time now (386.2_6 on an RT-AX68U) I have come to really appreciate it. A huge thank you to RMerlin for his hard work on this project!

I have a long history of having played around with linux distributions on my computer, and if I take a critical look at myself, I regret to say that I have wasted countless hours battling silly things like getting a wireless keyboard to work over bluetooth, or an application to run properly or some other thing. Hundreds more examples could be provided. In the process I surely learnt a thing or two, but I have an obsessive nature that is particularly sensitive to anything computer related, and once set on a task I can hardly rest until I have satisfied myself that that is completed. I struggle with 'if it 'aint broken don't fix it'.

All that would be OK, bar being married and having a job and wanting to make better utilisation of my time.

For that reason I ditched my personal computer entirely (gave it and its games and peripherals away to a good cause) and resolved that from then on I would only use computers predominantly for office work (which is of course on windows - everyone in my profession uses that).

Curiosity got the better of me recently and I installed 'OpenWrt' on one my TP-Link RE200 wireless extenders. Huge mistake. I have two of those in my house and fantasised about setting up some kind of poor man's mesh system with those. But I have just wasted the entirety of the past three days battling with the software on the extender to get it to operate something close to how it operated with its stock firmware (which actually gives higher throughput than my 4G connection can offer anyway - around 50Mbit/s). I ended up yesterday handing the device to my wife and offering for it to be destroyed. Perhaps I would be better investing in a second hand Asus router and setting up AI-Mesh.

In any case, what I think is great about Asuswrt-Merlin is that it combines a mixture of stock reliability / features with extended configurability and improvements. So there is the best of both worlds. Take the proprietary software in Asus routers that makes the QoS work in terms of classifying traffic. I think that is amazingly cool - like as I write this I see it even identify Zoom traffic and know that that is being prioritised on my network. Otherwise stuff just works and I don't have to spend hours tinkering with what amendment to a script or configuration file (or more likely many) to get the most important things to work.
 
Yes, its cool. Only thing that's somewhat missing for me is ability to change default FTP server port (who runs ftp on default port these days????????) . How hard it would be to implement it? Only Merlin knows.
 
Yes, its cool. Only thing that's somewhat missing for me is ability to change default FTP server port (who runs ftp on default port these days????????) . How hard it would be to implement it? Only Merlin knows.
You use the built in FTP on the router?

I use filezilla server to run mine with FTP over TLS enabled. Been running well for over a year now.

And to the OP I agree Merlin firmware and the community on this forum is the best 3rd party firmware on the market as far as I'm concerned. The love and the dedication that goes into this I've not seen matched by anyone else.
 
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Not to mention that when you consider what Asuswrt-merlin, combined with the various Add-ons have added to the feature set of the router I "originally" purchased...wow.
Kind of like buying a Honda Accord and ending up with a Tesla. ;-)
 
I dont use built in ftp becouse I cannot change default port. Instead I use sftp.
You can install it using "opkg install openssh-sftp-server"

Thanks for the suggestion I will keep it noted.
 

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