TL;DR

The Flint 2 seems to be a pretty awesome router. It was a little fiddly to set up my (quite complex) existing VLANs and wireless networks onto it, but it’s been working without a hitch since then :)

Why?

I’ve had a Draytek 2866ax router paired with an AP960C access point for about 18m[1]. I had big expectations for this setup, and it’s frankly been pretty disappointing. Especially considering how expensive it was for ‘SoHo’ gear rather than regular consumer stuff. My iPad would seem to hop around between access points, sometimes losing connectivity altogether. The _most_ annoying thing was a WiFi camera, which would disconnect and need a router reboot to re-establish its connection.

Why OpenWrt?

I’ve been using OpenWrt for over a decade now, and I’ve recently got more involved with the project.

Why GL.iNet?

I’ve bought a bunch of their travel routers over the years, which have all been faithful companions.

Some care is needed to pick models that are properly supported by stock OpenWrt, rather than the GL.iNet forks. But that’s a simple lookup of the table of hardware.

Why the Flint2?

I’d originally bought the OpenWrt One intending to use it as my new main router. But…

• It’s less powerful than the Flint2
• It doesn’t have enough switch ports[2]
• It has less capable WiFi

Put another way… the Flint2 has outrageously good specs, and solid OpenWrt support.

In almost every respect the Flint2 is the better device, with the exception of the One having space for an NVMe SSD. I liked the idea of my router having plenty of fast local storage (even if I don’t particularly have an application for it yet).

In the end I fell in love with the One as a development device, and that’s what I’ll keep using it for. After all I shouldn’t be tinkering with my main router.

Also a colleague got a Flint2, and so it had his seal of approval. After seeing them at a price I liked, only to see it hiked up, I set an alert on CamelCamelCamel and waited…

I didn’t have to wait long, less than a month later it was back at my desired price (for the Black Friday sale).

Physical setup

There was a disappointment on unboxing – the antennae aren’t removable. This meant that I had to wall mount the router to achieve optimal antenna positioning. But that in turn meant that the switch ports weren’t where I wanted them to be. I ended up using the 8 port managed switch I’d bought to go with the One.

In the picture above there’s one LAN cable running up to the NAS, which sits on a shelf at the top of the coat cupboard. The WAN cable to my fibre ONT and a LAN cable to the switch run down (along with the power cable).

The Flint2 has a couple of 2.5Gb ports. One is for WAN, which for now is hopelessly optimistic given the present services available in the UK. The other is for LAN, which just might offer improved throughput if a bunch of disparate links are busy at the same time, but isn’t an upgrade I’m in any hurry to do. 2.5Gb managed switches are beginning to come down in price, but so far only unrecognisable Chinese brands that come with mixed reviews.

Flash!

The first thing I did on powering up the router was reflash the firmware with stock stable OpenWrt (23.5.05). That went without a hitch, and I was straight into the familiar LuCI web interface.

I did an AI

The most complex config on the old router was all the DHCP reservations – dozens of them. Thankfully they could be saved out as a space separated file of MAC IP and Name. But I needed to translate that into OpenWrt config. A simple script would do it, but I don’t do that stuff every day, so I reckon it would take hours for me to actually write it and debug it. So instead I got Gemini to write a script for me. I’ve put the prompts and the output in this gist.

I generally don’t find coding assistants useful. But in this case, doing something that’s obvious, but doesn’t just flow from the fingers, it saved a whole lot of time.

Multiple VLANs, Multiple SSIDs

I run 3 WiFi networks:

1. The family network that has the NAS and printers on it.
2. A guest network, which mostly gets used by the kids’ friends.
3. A things network for stuff that I don’t trust (and that anyway doesn’t need access to the NAS etc.)

Each of those has it’s own WiFi SSID, and under the hood they’re on separate VLANs. In recent times I’ve even bought some managed switches so that some ‘things’ can be hard wired, but not on the main LAN.

This was the fiddly bit to set up. Partly because I’d just not used that set of OpenWrt features before, and partly because this is an area where the OpenWrt documentation would benefit from a little more love. In the end the videos from OneMarcFifty starting with VLANs in OpenWrt 21 showed the way.

My final (redacted) configs are in this gist, which I might use as the basis for an improved written guide on the topic.

Conclusion

It’s been a week, and I’ve been very happy with the stability, performance and reliability of the Flint2. It’s certainly an improvement on the previous setup.

I had a complex network config to replicate, which involved a learning journey for how that stuff works in OpenWrt. But everything I needed to do wasn’t just feasible, but reasonably sensible and intuitive once I’d got my head around the abstractions.

The WiFi camera has stayed online :)

Coda

I flashed OpenWrt onto my old UniFi AC Lite access point and installed it in the garage. It has 802.11r fast roaming enabled, which seems to work well. Hopefully it will be useful for when I need to look up documentation when doing repairs out there, and it might also provide coverage to the back garden for when the weather is warmer again.

I’m now inclined towards replacing the Draytek AP960C with something running OpenWrt so I can have a consistent fast roaming setup through the house.

Notes

[1] I previously had an earlier Draytek router paired up with a Ubiquiti UniFi AC Lite access point.
[2] I still ended up using the 8 port switch I’d bought to go with the One in order to get the cabling right for the Flint2 :/