Dugby

There are alternative uses for these Nighthawks, no need to throw away, sell or box them up. I have bought three XR700 and two XR500 (all low cost on eBay) that I’ve deployed in two houses. In each house, an XR500 is installed and operate OpenWRT firmware, used as our router to the ISP. This hardware & firmware is excellent and extremely reliable, no crashes, no outages, and security is updated regularly by the org for OpenWrt. The XR700s are reconfigured to be distributed Access Points (standard option within the native firmware) in the two houses, as they have extremely powerful WiFi radios that get the signals to the extremities of each house, and each XR700 allows us to have six LAN ports at these far corners of the houses for our device requirements. As AP’s these XR700 are extremely reliable and in 4 years I’ve had no unplanned outages with them, no failures, all attached devices always able to access the internet. Obviously I have chosen not to utilise many DumaOS features, as I have my reasons….

My primary router is a Fritz!Box 7590, off the four LAN ports are two XR700 (each configured as "access points") and two 16-port Netgear switches. Obviously; I have chosen not to use the features of DUMAOS in my configurations. The spare XR500 was bought from the 'bay' for a very reduced price, and is now configured as a warm-standby should I need to swap it into my network. As a former enterprise network engineer, I approach the RAS of my domestic network different to many.

I just successfully tested OpenWrt v23.05.3 on a spare XR500 that I keep should my primary router expire. OpenWrt is very easy to install if your follow the openwrt.org instructions, eg: To connect FTTP to your ISP, select your WAN port and enable PPPoE, add your ISP userid & password ====>> finished.

I could have misinterpreted the comments field against the XR700 in the previous version of the above referenced url. I recall the previous url published that DumaOS 3.2 was being ported to the XR500 and the following statement was annotated next to the XR700- "Once XR500 is finished, we can get a new build for the XR700 and it should work the same." Maybe the above documented words "the same" has different interpretations by the authors.

I usually keep a look out on this forum (and the Netgear downloads sites) for news on current firmware releases for both XR700 and XR500. I just noticed in the following url that Duma0S 3.3 is being ported to XR700 and XR500 https://support.netduma.com/support/solutions/articles/16000132677-dumaos-firmware-progress I am running the latest public Netgear releases 1.0.1.50 on XR700 and 2.3.2.134 on XR500 So what happened to general releases (non beta) of DumaOS 3.2 for both XR700 and XR500 ?