NetGear Nighthawk X10 As A High-End Home Router

[bug77]

I have the X6 and while it does its job flawlessly, it's in a price range where you can never vouch it's worth the money.

As for software, a couple months ago a couple of serious flaws were disclosed. A few weeks later I was using Netgear's software to check for an update and it was coming up empty. Yet when browsing their website, surely enough a newer version was readily available. Just before posting this I did another check (through their software) and this time it found a newer version. All in all, a bit funky, but gets the job done.

[starshipeleven]

I use a Linksys WRT1900ACS with Gargoyle firmware. I think I'm pretty happy with it with the large drawback of losing ipv6. Not sure if that's the fault of openwrt or gargoyle though. I could probably manually get something working but doesn't work out of the box.

Did you try LEDE release on it? Afaik the people on that device didn't complain about lack of ipv6.
(LEDE=future of OpenWRT since most devs migrated there)

[Chewi]

While the hardware itself looks interesting, I'd be very wary of any software coming from Netgear. This is no doubt true of many other vendors too but at work, we stumbled across a corker of an exploit on one of their pricier firewalls. It was a schoolboy error and you could trivially gain root shell access through their telnet login. We're not exactly security researchers so it wasn't hard to figure out. We didn't report it in the end as it was already fixed by the time we found it but I strongly suspect this was purely by accident. They'd changed much of the software stack and the old vulnerable script was still there, albeit unused. Between that and infuriating bugs like firewall rules becoming ineffective after reattaching cables, we decided to stop using them. I didn't like seeing them go to waste so I used the exploit to install OpenWRT, which took a little imagination to get around their boot-time checksum. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get the weird network hardware (MIPS Cavium) to work properly.

[Mauka]

Are you considering flashing the firmware to DD-WRT?

[computerquip]

I use a Linksys WRT1900ACS with Gargoyle firmware. I think I'm pretty happy with it with the large drawback of losing ipv6. Not sure if that's the fault of openwrt or gargoyle though. I could probably manually get something working but doesn't work out of the box.

[Michael]

Good call on getting a multi node wifi system for a house - probably your best bet.

I have the Nighthawk X8 - it does an absolutely excellent job once configured (the web interface is from the 90s and horrible). It does get quite warm though (passive heatsink and all) - do you have the same "getting really hot" issue on the X10 Michael?.

It doesn't get really hot and its fan only turns on occasionally.

[boxie]

Good call on getting a multi node wifi system for a house - probably your best bet.

I have the Nighthawk X8 - it does an absolutely excellent job once configured (the web interface is from the 90s and horrible). It does get quite warm though (passive heatsink and all) - do you have the same "getting really hot" issue on the X10 Michael?.

[starshipeleven]

We are well into the price range where it's cheaper and better to get some low-end x86 system and fit it with router-grade minpcie wifi cards.

Or just get a single router and 3-4 access points.

[cb88]

Netgears are junk these days... the one we had at work wouldn't hold a connection with half the computers that tried to connect to it.

And that was even after we excalated to engineering and they gave us a debug firmware (after a bunch of runaround...)

If you need a large area covered... ubiquity routers
My TP-Link is still serving me well so I would probably consider them in the future as well.

[Nille_kungen]

That's an expensive router, here in sweden it's 5290kr which translates to $590.
I think it's to much for a home router.