I’ve been running OpenWRT on my routers for a while now. It started off as just an experiment on my Mi Router 3c, but it now forms a very integral part of my homelab.
I’ve since helped set up OpenWRT on a lot of different routers for my friends’ home networks, giving old routers a new lease of life and making it more secure.
Of the different routers I’ve come across that support OpenWRT, Xiaomi ones tend to stand out to me:
- They’re fairly cheap
- Easily procurable in most markets
- Have very very decent specs for the price point, and,
- Aren’t hard to put OpenWRT on
I think I’ve only seen routers from TP-Link come close to this level of support for OpenWRT, but their hardware variations often throws an axe when it comes to OpenWRT support.
What are your thoughts, and what do you run OpenWRT on?
As to how you can go about debugging it, that part is hard. I've suffered from frequent disconnections on my OpenWRT install on a router, and I had to trawl through the system logs (it's there on LuCI) to see what was triggering the disconnection when using the AP. After you find the line you think could be it, Google for it to see if anyone else has had similar issues. Ask on the OpenWRT forums since people on there might have come across it and have a solution.
You should also check to see if a reconfig of a very basic AP triggers the issue.