What to do from here

General discussion
21

I must agree with the OP, @Mr_Colorado, though my desired initial configuration is simpler.

I backed the Omnia because I wanted an Open router that I wouldn’t have to hack to have solid functionality. But could hack in the future, when/if I needed to.

CZ.NIC promised this, asking a premium price for it, along with a list of promised (and important) enhancements, and I gladly agreed.

But opening the box was a disappointment: I couldn’t attach the antennas to the loose connectors! The first thing I had to do was take it apart and tighten things up. Not what I was expecting. That’s when I decided not to power it up right away, and instead check to see what problems others were having.

I’ve been monitoring this forum, looking for happy “Just Works!” posts and finding way, way too few (even allowing for the simple fact that problems get posted far more often than successes).

What I see is incomplete documentation, patches to outdated code, and other barriers preventing Plug&Play happiness. Not at all what I expected.

I thought I was backing a solution, not buying more problems.

I wanted the basic features they committed to in the campaign, and at this point it seems mainly to be the WRT hackers who are seeing much success.

I was not expecting all the advanced features to be present right away. But I expected all the basics to be working and easily accessible. Forum threads described having to jump between multiple configuration interfaces, including the command line and manually editing config files, just to get all the basics working right.

If I wanted to build and configure my own WRT router, I would have done that rather than back the Omnia.

I’ve had my Omnia for over a month, and have yet to plug it in, simply because I don’t have the time or desire to mess with it

For now, I’m using an old PC running hardened Fedora connected between my ISP and my wired LAN and old AP. Everything was either configured correctly by default, or could be updated with a few clicks. It does work, but it is a bit large, noisy, and power-hungry.

Maybe things will improve with future Omnia updates. But a pretty thorough cleanup must happen soon, before the end of the year.

After then, I’ll be tempted to put my Omnia on eBay and buy something that’s actually usable. This probably won’t help CZ.NIC store sales, but the presence of the store should help me get a better price for my new and unused (but repaired) Omnia.

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22

Well, price is premium, because Hardware is premium and costs quite a lot.
Nearest HW would be Linksys WRT1900 series and it costs only a fraction of less, with its plastic case and less flash and memory.

They have pretty much stuffed top of the line Hardware, which they could get their hands on, into that little metal box.

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23

Thank you everyone for your feedback and encouragement.

What I’ll do for the time being is wait and see what else everyone is doing from this point forward.

I guess like a lot of backers, it’s a simple frustration to back some really awesome hardware, wait for a long time have it arrive only to realize that initially it’s not completely ready to roll out and will require more initial effort than expected.

I’ll echo other’s comments that I wasn’t expecting turnkey but my sentiment is around the idea that we could put together a truly magnificent solution with the TO architecture if one so desired.

It was the “possibilities” that compelled me to jump in on the TO and frankly that hasn’t changed one bit.

Thanks again!

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28

Few comments deleted because of offensive behaviour. Thank you for respecting each other.

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29

Hi Mr_Colorado,
do not hesitate to open the package and try your Omnia. It is a great device. Everything is working as it should work, there is no show stopper.

Yes, there were some problems but we are standing face-to-face to every one of them. Work on completing all the stretch goals from IGG campaign is in the process, those are mainly about simplifying what Omnia can already do with setup via LuCI or SSH. We are working on it very hard and we will complete every single goal to bring our users smooth experience in Foris UI. That is my promise and stretch goals are not the end of development.

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30

Thank you very much Vaclav.

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31

First of all I am a very happy tweaker sticking my nose in any corner the Turris Omnia provides me with! It is what I expected from hardware / software point of view!

So in general I am really happy with the device (albeit not being as much turn-key as I expected either)! And I salute cz.nic for delivering!! But the following is where I - kind of - “feel” @Mr_Colorado (as a symbol for a question for more support - especially as manual tweaking is required to get the most out of the device), although the sentiment is a nit less strong represented in my gut t.b.f.:

@Mr_Colorado shipping logistics were given as a reason to postpone documentation. As hardware logistics should be tackled for the major part now I’m sure the support part will soon pick up. So English documentation and video tutorials, as were promised (or even stretch goals). Also I trust cz.nic to follow up on bugfixes / lxc-template development / active forum feedback etc. Personally I’m not disappointed, I still firmly belief cz.nic will deliver, it will just take some time. Strengthened by remarks as such:

Ok… no real biggies encountered on my end, which helps but I’m very positive that the promised life-long support will be picked up (as it played a major part in many backers decision to back this project, I am sure)!

But please people… even if you are disappointed / angry, please stay civilized. No point (nor sense) in “yelling” at people through the forum. It may help blow of some steam, but statistics in customer-support research shows that staying nice (and keeping your cool) while “negotiating” is far more effective for getting actual results in your advantage (and is also a lot more pleasant)!

–Just my two cents :innocent:

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32

so far it does what is supposed to do (routing @ 1gbps, doing dhcp & firewalling, running a supported openwrt) only the sfp module hasn’t worked “out of the box” but considering how rare an ISP giving consumers SFP modules is & a fix on the horizon, i consider that expected.

true that’s just a basic setup & i haven’t even scratched the surface of TO’s potential, but i won’t mind if it never does more - if in 5 to 10 years time it will still run a supported & current version of openwrt provided via automatic updates.

plus cheaper routers tend to lock-up and need a reset, TO has been going blazing fast a few weeks now… now that apple, possibly the last consumer router manufacturer providing 5years+ of automatic firmware updates, is exiting the business, the only routers left i’d buy my granma, are prosumer ones… compared to alternatives like cisco, ubiquiti, mikrotik, linksys wrt, etc i think TO stacks up well

plus quite frankly i like supporting a small european company :slight_smile:

33

@bernstein I must admit you keep giving various threads a spin with a positive vibe that I have to admit to!

Indeed the device hardware is very nice. Together with the lifelong support makes it a top-notch router in and of itself…

And… it even gets better!

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34

Yes, the price is totally fine. The hardware is great and works pretty well.

Admittedly, I may not be the typical user. I opened the box before I powered it on, as I do with almost all new gadgets and hardware. I tried to integrate the device into LEDE/OpenWRT upstream but this is not an easy task and I had to postpone it. Maybe by the end of the year?

The Wifi issue is still a thing. Hoping for the kernel version bump. In general, if you are used to build your own firmware, and the new router is not supported upstream, it sets you back a bit. Patience is key :head_bandage:

Will buy the next version, if there is one to come, too. Great device.

35

A post was split to a new topic: Can’t get IP address on WAN

36

What guide did you use for majordomo and the ssh honeypot thing? I am new to all this and trying to figure them both out,

37

Also I am extremely disappointed! The router has a lot of potential but is currently a green banana

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38

Hi there. Majordomo is simple. Go into luci > system > software > filter > type '‘majordomo’" and press find. Install it.
Then go to the foris gui, ( the normal www config page ) >updater> and downunder you see ‘‘majordomo’’. mark it and press save. It will update from now.

In the same foris>updater you see SSH HONEYPOT. mark it active.
to forward the ext port 22, make a rule in luci> network> firewall> firewall port forwarding , ext port on WAN pr22 to LAN router IP port 58732.

This works for me.

good luck :slight_smile:

39

Wel, I’m a backer from January and been waiting 10 months to get my Turris Omnia. Totally beileved in the concept and idea. Been using a Netgear R7000 for a while which works beautifully. Also work from home so need a stable connection pretty much 24/7 which I have with my ISP modem and Netgear R7000 combo.
When I swapped the Turris Omnia in it took me 3 days to get it to work (sort of) reliably. Yet somehow 802.11ac felt not as good (i.e. both range and speed) as the Netgear R7000. On top of that I had some random disconnections which caused my VPN connection to work to drop forcing me to restart loads of stuff and that was a real annoyance! Despite all this I actually stuck with the Omnia (It would have been easy to switch back to the R7000). Until the mother of all f ups happened… Upgraded to 3.3 and boom my WiFi is fubar… Ath10k (5GHz card) after upgrade to 3.3 I still stuck with the Omnia and switch to 802.11n 2.4GHz for the last few days…
There doesn’t seem to be any communication from the Turris guys… Don’t even know if they work on a fix… For a problem like this they should be scrambling to get this fixed asap with proper communication to show they care about their backers (we’re not merely users)… So this morning I thought life was too short to get annoyances like that and I switched back to the R7000 which works reliably.

Note to Turris team: I’m a backer not a beta tester!

40

The problematic driver, at least reading the commit logs from the ŧest branch, has been reverted. I’m not sure when it will land on the routers (I just had a notification of a kernel update, but I’m not sure).

41

I guess you’ve missed many Turis Team’s posts in this forum since the 3.3 update. This is one of the important ones:

https://forum.test.turris.cz/t/ath10k-after-upgrade-to-3-3/2146/92

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42

I appreciate the pointer but this was posted 1h ago when my post was 6h ago so!
Anyway thanks for letting me know.