GL.iNet GL-MT6000 (Flint 2) Router on Sale for Prime Day

I have been using a GL.iNet GL-MT6000 (Flint 2) WiFi 6 router on my home network since last December and it's on sale for Prime Day. It's a good deal if you're in need of a new home or small business router for use behind a cable modem or similar connection.

The router supports WiFi 6 on the 2.4 and 5 Ghz bands, VLANs, and more than one WAN connection.

It has built in support for AdGuard but I'm running a Pi-hole VM on my Proxmox box for DNS-based filtering.

I've been very happy with it. Underneath it runs OpenWRT. GL.iNet provides a custom web GUI for it that allows you to handle most functions but you can also access the OpenWRT LuCI web GUI for more granular control. OpenWRT is extensible, which has allowed me to install extensions like fail2ban and also blacklist entire countries based on their IP blocks. E.g., any connection initiated from know hotspots for bad actors like Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the PRC, Best Korea, and Iran are simply dropped by my firewall.

Give it a look if you want something more capable than the gateway provided to you by your ISP.

New Router

A couple years ago I installed an Asus RT-AC66U 802.11ac router at home. A few weeks ago it started acting flaky, requiring frequent reboots, and finally crapped out entirely yesterday. To get our home network back online I took my Comcast XB2 Arris TM862G gateway out of bridge mode, enabling routing and WiFi.

The performance stunk, largely because it's 2.4GHz only and I'm in a subdivision, so I get a lot of interference on that band. The fastest I could get on speedtest.net was about 20 Mbps down, totally unacceptable for what should be ~100 Mbps service.

So, yesterday afternoon I ordered a Linksys WRT1900ACS router from Amazon, selected one day delivery (I have Prime), and it was dropped off this morning while I was eating my oatmeal.

My initial impressions are generally favorable and setup was straightforward. Performance is plenty acceptable. After installing it I ran a test and got about 96 Mbps down. I just ran a test and got this:

I can certainly live with that.

The Linksys offers some features I'm unlikely to take advantage of, e.g., USB ports to serve files or a printer. However, it does support DynDNS and NoIP, so I may setup OpenVPN on it for remote access and possible as a private VPN for when I travel.