So I’ve seen the TP-Link and GL.inet travel routers, and it looks like some of the GLs are/were built to run wrt firmwares. Stock TP firmwares have been pretty full features in my experience. I really want USB-C power. The GL wireguard support looks useful too, but it looks like their newer stuff is proprietary? Another want, not need, is 5 GHz band.
Does anyone have a favorite model or another board that can be flashed?
I use the GL.inet Shadow and have been happy with it. If you want 5Ghz and don’t mind that it’s a little larger (still small), I’d consider the Slate. It supports the latest version of OpenWRT. https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-ar750s
They include a custom GUI on top of OpenWRT, which I like. But LuCI is still there.
I have a slate (705S) and I love it. I have a wireguard server set up on an RPi at home and when I travel I plug in the slate, connect it to the hotel wifi (or Ethernet if I can), and flip the switch to turn on the VPN. All my traffic goes through my home connection, and I can still access my internal services.
I’ve even used it to save the day when an AirB&B’s wifi was too weak for the living room smart tv to connect when the family wanted to watch a movie.
I’m also currently exploring options for travel routers and am particularly interested in their interaction with captive portals.
My main question is: Are there any travel routers out there that offer the ability to automatically log into captive portals? This feature would be incredibly convenient for frequent travelers like me, eliminating the need to manually enter credentials each time.
Additionally, I’m curious if there are any plugins or software modifications that can be added to existing travel routers to enable this functionality. If anyone has experience with setting up a travel router to automatically handle captive portals, your insights would be highly valuable.
What’s the usage scenario for a portable router? I’ve never really understood the benefits of one.
Disclaimer: I hate cruises and the entire industry, but ended up getting roped into a few before COVID by weird family dynamics.
I found a portable router to be pretty handy on cruise ships. The only Internet available is through the ship’s WiFi, and the Internet package I had limited connectivity to a single connected device per cabin. The travel router would be the single MAC and allow all our devices to connect. I was also able to share with family in the next cabin over.
A few months ago I stayed in a hotel for about a week and I couldn’t get my Nintendo Switch to connect through their Wi-Fi. My Switch also doesn’t work on my phone’s hotspot for some reason, even though other devices connect and work fine. Anyway, that scenario would’ve been nice for a travel router, but I didn’t bring it with me on that trip.
This actually is maybe the most legitimate usage of a travel router that I’ve ever heard.
If I ever find myself planning to go on a cruise (highly unlikely), I’ll be purchasing a travel router.
I just think they’re neat!
The wireguard tunnel is what I’m most interested in. Having that, and then my pihole, be handed out via DHCP is worth $50. More than that is a harder sell.
I just have wireguard setup on my different systems (phone, laptop, tablet, etc.). Just flip it on/off as needed…
Honestly, I guess I loath the idea of carrying another electronic device…
I could understand them a decade or more ago when not every phone was Hotspot ready, but now days I’d just use PDANet
I use a gl.inet Mango for work. I’m a field tech for industrial machines, I connect the router to the machine’s LAN (if it doesn’t have a switch, the two ports on the Mango come in handy, I just insert it in an existing connection) and I have wireless to the PLCs, allowing me to walk around the installation to check things with my laptop.
Bonus point for the wifi client that allows me to connect to a customer’s wifi or my phone’s hotspot and also have internet on my laptop for mails, etc.
The other day I used it to connect to three different subnets on three machines, one on one port, and two on the other with a switch, again with wifi client for internet.
That’s a cleaver solution to a problem that brings lots of quality of life benefits to your job. Kudos!
I bought the GL-AR750S a while ago and kept it stock. It’s a customized version of OpenWrt with an “advanced mode” that lets you get into what I believe is just the regular wrt configuration portal.
I didn’t have anything that the router couldn’t do from VPN to repeating to spoofing Mac to get through cafe-style portals at hotels.
Looking at their website, it looks like their newer models still use wrt https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/start.
As others has pointed out, I’m using the GL.inet 750s (slate), I’m in a hotel right now using it! I got mine several years ago and I’m not sure how easy they can be found now. Like you pointed out, I wanted to run stock openWRT on it, it wasn’t available when I first bought it, but now it is a supported device. It’s nice, I keep two backups, one for wired ethernet (when the hotel has it) and the other is for wifi where I connect the 2.4 radio in client mode to the hotel internet and the 5ghz radio in master mode as an AP and bridge the ethernet ports. It works well, but it does have a micro USB for power.
I really want USB-C power.
You can get a C-to-micro adapter if that will work for your use case and you have a micro-USB router that you like.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer VPN Virtual Private Network
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
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