As a sometime wireless hacker, it’s a bit embarrassing to admit that I’ve had the factory firmware on my wifi router all this time, but when I first tried OpenWrt on it, ath9k was only a few months old and dropped connections all the time. Thus, I made do with the factory install but ran many of the essential services (dns, dhcp, tftp, etc) from my Linux workstation. And life continued apace.
After a recent network upgrade, I found I could no longer make my router understand ipv6, and so it was time to put the original firmware to pasture. In the intervening years, ath9k grew up, so I took another try with OpenWrt. The install took about 20 minutes, most of which was configuring the firewall and copying my existing dnsmasq config into a uci-friendly format. Everything works great and my ipv6 is back. Nice job, all involved!
I suppose I could now eat even more dogfood by running a mesh interface on one of the radios. In the past, I’ve tinkered with mesh as a wireless distribution system, but I don’t have much of a use for that currently with every room in the new place being wired. Perhaps my backyard could use expanded coverage?