I have the option to grab a couple of Cisco Meraki MR33 APs, which are about to become EOL in July and I'm wondering if they are worth it to run OpenWRT on them. The jailbreak process looks fairly involved so I really don't want to throw a bunch of time at this if it's not worth it. The plan was to use them as home APs to improve coverage throughout a three story house. So, network dudes, watchafink?
They require a license to use them normally though, yes? Hence the flashing. It'd be nice if Cisco would release a firmware to remove the cloud/license requirement once it goes EOL, but that's hardly likely.
They 100% need a license to avoid being ewaste normally. OpenWRT is the only way to save them from the scrapheap now.
Yeah they will never do that with Meraki as the Meraki kit has no-on device admin UI and no CLI except for a break glass password pane basically. They’d have to write and support on device config UI and they don’t want to - not least because it’ll break their monopoly over the licenses. You have to put OpenWRT on just to give it the admin interfaces! I’ve never jailbroken any, especially not the ones where you gotta solder onto pads, but it plenty of people do happily. Just make sure the local storage is sufficient for the type of OpenWRT image you want to run, and ought to be fine.
