Merlin has the problem that it doesn't have something like like aimesh where you can auto synch the config between all your routers. I've got a network of three Asus routers and they work great and I can admin them like they're one router, and I'd hate to have to give that to up.
Will that let you download speeds greater than 160 mbps? The last time I tried Merlin, the ASUS router I had wouldn't download at full speed allowed by my internet connection?
Friendly reminder that OpenWrt supports Raspberry Pi and every Pi from 3 onwards makes for a great, inexpensive router. Adding WiFi can be done with any off-the-shelf WiFi router or access point, brand new or second hand. Since they aren't exposed to the Internet, remote vulnerabilities are significantly mitigated.
I thought OpenWRT doesn't support modems due to licencing issues.
So, I guess you would need a separate modem, or ISP router in bridge mode, or double NAT with OpenWRT being DMZ
I got fed up with trying to find the right firmware each time. It was too much of a hassle. Then small issues with the one I had.. you need an earlier version... I love the idea, it was just a pain.
If you are willing to spend a bit more upfront, I bought a mini PC in 2017 and installed opnsense on it. It's still rock solid. For wifi, I use a separate ap (a ubiquity UAP that I bought in 2015) and it is also going strong. Almost a decade of rock solid performance easily beats out any other router I've owned in terms of both performance and cost.
Another friendly reminder, enterprise-grade routers like Mikrotik are fantastic. They don't have wifi builtin, so you may never need to upgrade it if you get fast enough uplink (mine is gigabit, so should be fine). You'll need a separate AP (I got Ubiquiti). They're way more feature complete than nonsense like these from ASUS, and they generally have more secure firmware.
So glad my RT-AC86U kept having serious issues with the 2.4 GHz radio such that nothing would stay connected to the internet without 5 GHz support so I eventually trashed the damn thing after every solution failed.
This would be self hosted so you can access your own internal network. Wireguard on OpenVPN are your best options there, personally I use wireguard/pivpn.
Yup, I did that last week and it's pretty easy. Basically:
Set up a VPS and configure wireguard
Set up your computer to connect to it (or your router if you literally only want remote admin); you'll probably want to configure persistent connections
Set up your phone to connect to it
Test it at work sometime to make sure it all works
I do it in two hops: connect to VPS then to internal computer. There are other configurations (e.g. talk to peer computers directly), but this works well for me.
The way to tell which ones are safe is to look up legal history for each company. When the home country of the company demands all the data they have, the companies are going to give all the data they have. So if a court order of a VPN yields nothing or almost nothing, then you know they really don't save any logs.
As someone else mentioned already, proton and mullvad are the good ones in, but that can change if either company gets bought out or changes management etc
According to the CVE it looks like my XT8 is already updated beyond the affected version. It says through version 3.0.0.4.388_24609 and mine is version 3.0.0.4.388_24621.
I also noticed this vulnerability was posted on May 29th with the last update being June 13th. Seems like this a report that's already outdated.