Notes on running OpenWrt at home

2026-05-02

Two years ago I replaced the ISP router with a small x86 box running OpenWrt. The goal was modest: stable Wi-Fi through separate access points, a guest network that cannot see the rest of the house, and logs I can actually read.

What went well

• Separate VLANs for the main network, guests and the handful of smart plugs. The plugs cannot talk to anything except the internet.
• Upgrades are uneventful as long as I keep a list of installed packages and back up /etc/config first.
• The built-in statistics made it obvious which device was saturating the uplink every evening. (It was a cloud photo backup.)

What broke

Exactly one upgrade went wrong: a package I depended on had been renamed, and the router came up without it. Since then I keep a short text file of every change I make by hand, with the date and the reason.

What I would do differently

Buy hardware with a little more headroom than seems necessary, label every cable on day one, and write the network diagram down before I need it rather than after.

The best home network is the one nobody in the house notices.