20 Apr
2012
20 Apr
'12
3:24 a.m.
2. There's a substantial risk of bricking them when you replace the vendor-supplied firmware with OpenWRT or upgrade to the latest openwrt.
Wrong. Sane models have will attempt to boot off TFTP for a few seconds every boot. Even if you brick it, you can install a new image via TFTP. This is how I do *all* installs, because it's less aggravating than dealing with some "upload new firmware" page of the vendor OS.
You need to be very careful where you deploy such a router. Setting this up with a tftp-enabled port (often all Ethernet ports) exposed to a school network would be madness. James