Open-source router firmware?

[xela]

Do any of you have an informed view on the relative merits of DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, et al? It's close to ten years since I looked into them in any detail; ISTR deciding at the time that none was significantly better or worse than the others. (Though I'm also fairly sure the decision I made then — to use DD-WRT — had a more substantive basis than just a dice-roll.)

Now I'm looking to set up a NAT with USB tethering from my Pixel as its upstream. Googling didn't find me any good leads for doing this with DD-WRT, but several discussions of doing it with OpenWRT. So I installed OpenWRT on a Cisco/Linksys E4200, with one of its switch ports connected to my MacBook Air via a USB_Ethernet adapter. (And with that and power as the only cables connected to it.) The E4200 came up just fine, giving my Mac a DHCP address in 192.168.1/24, and with the GUI as described in the OpenWRT setup docs. But when I rebooted it after a very little basic configuration (essentially just setting a root password and pasting an ssh public key in), my Mac came up with a self-assigned IP (i.e. one in 169.254.0.0/16).

I've now installed OpenWRT on the E4200 twice with the same results. So before I try to wrestle that into submission, I figured it would be worth while to run this by you all and see what you say.

Comments

USB pass-through?

[xela]

While I'm thinking about it: One of the "et al" above is DebWRT, which is pretty much what you'd expect from the name. I haven't looked into it past reading the Wikipedia article for two reasons:

1. The only item under "Versions" in the entry is from 2009
2. It requires USB storage — and I'm using USB for WAN and have only one USB port

Which latter makes me wonder: Does anyone know of a USB thumb drive with USB pass-through? (I'm imagining a maybe 1 × 2 × 5 cm stick with maybe 32GB of flash, the usual male type-A connector on one end, and a female on the other.)