How to Remove Dd-wrt Firmware From Netgear R6400

Some
routers
are small, sleek, and thoughtfully designed to blend into the background, whatever your dwelling house or part environment.

FlashRouter’s Netgear Nighthawk X10 R9000
with DD-WRT doesn’t worry about any of that. Information technology’due south a big black box (224 x 168 10 74mm) with center-catching angled lines, four very large agile antennas, and no less than 17 LEDs to indicate the status of its wireless modes, WAN and 6 Gigabit Ethernet ports. It’south not ugly, but permit’s be realistic: you’re going to struggle to go along information technology out of sight.

In that location’s a lot of pinnacle-quality networking engineering science inside: 802.11ac and 802.11ad Wi-Fi support, aslope a quad-core CPU, with quad-stream and MU-MIMO to ensure you’ll be able to handle simultaneous 4K streaming and other tasks.

The Wi-Fi interface gets you up to iv.6Gbps in theory, a built-in 10 Gigabit fiber connection provides up to 10x faster (than ‘manifestly’ Gigabit) wired connections to network storage, and we could practice another entire review just on the bonus features (Plex Media Server, support for aggregating two LAN ports, Echo/Alexa compatibility, and more).

What’s actually interesting here, though, is that this is a FlashRouter, a Nighthawk X10 with custom firmware which makes it very easy to prepare and manage a VPN at the router level.

If yous’ve ever tried to set up upward a
VPN
at habitation, yous’ll understand the hassles: installing apps on every compatible device, setting upward all the others manually, maybe finding out you can only connect five devices at once and having to ration which ones yous employ, and and then keeping everything updated.

Using a FlashRouter avoids all of this considering there’south no software to install, and no complicated transmission setup. All yous take to do is use the custom firmware to select your VPN (many large-name providers are supported), enter your username and password, and you’re done – at that place is no networking expertise required. Supported VPNs are equally follows: blackbox,
CyberGhost,
ExpressVPN,
HideMyAss,
IPVanish, IVPN,
NordVPN,
Private Cyberspace Access, ProtonVPN, PureVPN, SaferVPN, Surfshark, VPN Unlimited, VyprVPN and Windscribe.

Once you’ve set the router, connect to it as usual, from as many devices as you like, and the router protects them all via its unmarried connexion to the VPN. Easy.

And if y’all don’t demand to push everything through the VPN – perchance information technology’ll dull you lot down, or cease some devices from working at all – you lot can selectively ready specific devices to bypass the tunnel and utilize your regular ISP instead.

There is a price to pay for all this convenience, of course. Correct now information technology’s a
special cost of $515
(the regular price is $565), with options including $15 for a Britain, EU or Australian ability supply and plug, and a further $15 to extend the warranty from ane to ii years.

If that leaves your eyes watering, opting for a recertified model cuts the cost downwards to $300 (currently, the regular cost for this version is $350). Become for the two-year warranty and that could be a smart option for deal hunters.

Setup

This FlashRouter spin on the Netgear Nighthawk X10 R9000 arrived safely packed in a sturdy box, with an Ethernet cablevision, a power adapter, and a single A4 sheet of paper with a Quick Starting time Guide.

The instructions are simple and direct plenty for even the greenest of networking newbies. If the FlashRouter is your only router, connect information technology direct to your modem; if information technology’south a second device, connect it to your existing router. Power it upwardly, then connect to the FlashRouter’south wireless network using the Wi-Fi password printed in the Quick Start Guide.

FlashRouter’southward app helps you set up the Nighthawk X10 with the details of your VPN account, so if you’ve not signed up with one of the supported VPNs simply all the same, now would exist a good time.

Enter your VPN username and password and the app prompts you to choose your preferred location. You also get a handful of settings, typically including an ‘car connect’ option (the router automatically connects to the VPN when information technology starts), a global impale switch and the ability to view connection logs.

The kill switch is particularly handy. Most VPNs merits to offer some kind of kill switch, maintaining your privacy past blocking internet access if the VPN drops, but at that place are a pile of potential issues (the switch may be turned off by default, might not encompass every platform or protocol, or sometimes won’t even work full-stop). Moving the kill switch to the router ensures it protects everything, out of the box, without y’all having to do anything else.

You may go a few other options, depending on your provider. NordVPN includes an Order feature which enables sorting servers by countries nearest to you, or depending on server load; Private Internet Admission has a option of encryption (AES-128-CBC or AES-256-CBC); Surfshark supports enabling its CleanWeb DNS feature, blocking access to malicious websites for all connected devices.

This might look a little basic if you’re used to fine-tuning your VPN performance, merely go on in mind that’s not such a good idea with routers (your settings affect all devices, not just 1, so generally they should be as safely mid-range as possible). FlashRouter’s options encompass the basics, and that’southward fine with usa.

FlashRouter app

Once you lot’ve set up the NightHawk X10, at that place’s not a lot else to exercise, at least in theory. Information technology’s set to your preferred VPN location, and information technology’ll reconnect to the VPN if you turn information technology off and on again. If you’re happy with that, you tin leave the NightHawk X10 entirely alone, much like y’all would with whatsoever other router.

You lot can change your VPN location from FlashRouter’south app, just as you did during setup, simply this isn’t quite as unproblematic every bit you’ll see with a standalone VPN app.

Open a location list on a VPN provider’s ain app, for case, and you’ll typically get a elementary display of country and maybe city names, perhaps with load figures or latencies to help yous spot the best choices. Click Connect and some apps will apply smart routing options to find the best server.

Try this with the FlashRouter app, and (depending on your provider) information technology’s a little more complicated. Location names are sometimes hard to recognize – we suspect non all users volition immediately know whether ‘cr16.nordvpn.com.tcp.ovpn’ is a good choice, for case. With some providers, there’s no indication of which server might evangelize the all-time performance, either; you just have to pick one and encounter for yourself.

While that tin exist a usability issue, we suspect most users won’t demand to change the router location very often. And if you’re an exception, there are workarounds.

Although the FlashRouter is designed to handle all your devices, yous tin can choose to road some through your regular Internet service provider. And if you lot have a dual-router setup, y’all can still connect to your original router via a VPN app on your mobile, laptop or anything else, then change location from that app, just every bit you ever accept.

If you’re happy with your VPN location, but more concerned well-nigh some low-level technical tweakery, you too get full access to the NightHawk X10’s DD-WRT firmware. Whether you’re looking to play with the networking basics (IPs, DHCP) or wireless security settings, prepare a hotspot or reconfigure the firewall, there’s all the configurability you lot’ll e’er need.

Operation

Assessing the performance of any router is hard at the best of times, but factor in a selection of 15 VPNs and in that location’s no individual exam we can practise that will give you a complete thought of the speeds you might see.

On the hardware side, the Nighthawk X10’southward powerful quad-core CPU, active antennas and broad support for networking technologies (802.11n, 802.11ac, 802.11ad, 7x Gigabit LAN ports) gives y’all more than enough power and range to cope with most situations.

The ability to handle 4x simultaneous streams could make a huge difference all on its own. Nosotros set up a couple of sound streams on our ISP’s basic modem – which was all it could handle – and download speeds dropped to 23Mbps on our 75Mbps test line. However, the NightHawk X10 managed 64Mbps without difficulty, and there were no streaming glitches.

Whatever your local situation, your last speeds depend on the VPN provider. Check out our
reviews
of your favorites to find out how they performed when testing using a standalone app.

Would connecting via a router, rather than a native client, impact performance? We ran some tests using an ExpressVPN business relationship, and information technology made no measurable deviation. As nosotros mentioned above, it’south more hard to choose the optimum server for more than afar locations, and that might accept an effect, simply otherwise the FlashRouter hardware should deliver great speeds in most situations.

Final verdict

An expensive only extremely powerful router which makes it much easier to protect all your household devices with your favorite VPN.

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