I recently made the decision to invest in a home WiFi router which could provide a VPN client right from the router for my home. Having in the past been a huge fan of Asus routers, and currently owning a Netgear Nighthawk router, I made the decision to move back to Asus. I acquired an Asus RT-AC88U. I did this because it has a beefy dual-core Arm CPU, 512MB of RAM, and even better, a community has developed around adding a few additional features to it without requiring DD-WRT or OpenWRT.

This community is ASUSWRT-MERLIN. From the webpage:

Asuswrt-Merlin is an alternative, custom version of that firmware. Developped by Eric Sauvageau, its primary goals are to enhance upon the existing firmware without bringing any radical changes, and to fix some of the known issues and limitations, while maintaining the same level of performance as the original firmware. This means Asuswrt-Merlin retains full support for NAT acceleration (sometimes referred to as “hardware acceleration”), enhanced NTFS performance (through the proprietary drivers used by Asus from either Paragon or Tuxera), and the Asus exclusive features such as AiCloud or the TrendMicro-powered AiProtection. New feature addition is very low on the list of priorities in this project.

I recommend giving this a try if you’re looking for something more than what is provided out of the box from Asus. I’ll detail my VPN setup in a future post.