The Turris Omnia router is a great product but my concern is the documentation.
For example just on using the router with OpenVPN or Softether VPN (Which would even be better… http://www.softether.org/) it would be nice to have documentation that actually walks through all the steps in setting the router up as :
Server
Client to a server
Mikrotik produces great routers with tons of features but has the worst documentation and therefore the router becomes useless to most users.
What are your plans for actual documentation? I not talking about leaving to the users to try and get help in some forum or research OpenWRT forums but solid documentation that your supporters can follow.
Yes, this may be true but based on the comments and the large number of pledges, I suspect only a fraction of the people are actually capable of fully utilizing the router without decent documentation.
Also, this isn’t an excuse for the lack or poor documentation given I believe that the goal is to sell this as a general product to compete with the Netgears. Linksys, TP-Links etc.
well, I don’t think that scope of all this is to compete with manufactures like tp-link…
regarding first part…you should not underestimate technical skills of people, which are willing to pay 5x more than for a common router and then wait another long months for delivery. believe or not, but I bet that they exactly know what they are buying…
I cannot promise you that there will be a comprehensive guide to everything that is possible with Omnia, at least not from day 1. On the other hand, we currently already have many recipes prepared for the original router Turris (https://www.turris.cz/doc/, these are in Czech now, but we are working on a translation) and we will definitely add more. As for now, there are recipes for the following topics.
OpenVPN
NAS
Network boot
USB printer sharing
Wake on LAN
DNS
IPv6 tunnels
VLAN setup
Multi-WAN setup
Internet connection using LTE or 3g, tethering, etc.
Caching proxy Squid
Transparent Tor routing
USB webcam integration
soudcard integration
DVB support
Root access to console
Also, our web interface Foris is much easier to use than OpenWrt LuCI and can be used for most basic setups.
It should be rather easy to setup a repo for the translation. In that way, people could send patches or whatever. Maybe look at projects like Debian, Fedora etc. They do many translations and have probably good workflows and tools in place.
Maybe a good wiki would do as well?
Last but not least, most documentation could be actually on the router itself, what are the 4GB of eMMC for, when you don’t use them. Those, who wouldn’t need the documentation, would just overwrite/ delete the partition.
Can you please think about trying to use whatever leverage you have to provide chipset documentation to us?
Or at least to selected developers outside your organization. There are a lot of people interested in this who can do keep kernel/driver level work, but it’s hard to do without spec sheets (as Dave Taht points out in the fq_codel question)
@bedrich_kosata any chance of future instructions regading Omnia’s virtual server functionality, or documentation addressing Omnia’s implementation of LXC (including its usage by the end-users) in general?
Squid is used for LAN clients to connect the to the outside. I am not sure how well it supports the reverse proxy function, but you can certainly install something like Nginx for this.
Would it be possible to start “releasing” documentation / tutorials? The fact that the router itself is delayed doesn’t necessarily has to delay the pre-unpackaging fun! right?
Or maybe put up an official wiki or something like that (so it can start growing in an open-source spirit)?
I’m sure it would be greatly appreciated by the community, in anticipation of the hardware (and possibly even further boost sales)!
I am really happy to hear that the documentation will be comprehensive. I am not a professional and many aspects of Router/Switch technology is completely confusing. It does not help that many routers seem to have GUIs which have been translated badly from Chinese. I am not looking for ducumentation that will clutter up the device for those who do not need hand-holding, but some sort of quick link to newbee explanations would be very useful for me.
I am particularily concerned about security. In the coming IOT age and endless hacker attempts I am getting myself very confused with all the endless abreviations etc. Some plain english would be nice.
I firmly believe that the market for the Turris router will grow fast if it becomes known as “easy to use, but powerful as hell”.
Now that the product is beginning to ship is the English documentation available?
Also, where is the product source code, build scripts, etc?
Finally, I’d recommend having a pinned post on this board with links to all the relevant product information so we don’t have to search the forums to find it.
With the first batches (ready to be) shipped, any word on the documentation (and/or instruction videos etc. that were referred to during the campaign), yet?
Or at least some info (if no documentation is ready to be released yet). E.g. What distribution platform will be used? Any centralized platforms being set up? Etc.?
The “radio silence” regarding documentation / instructions is worrying me a little. Could anyone give out a commit (or at lest estimate) on how soon “soon” will be?
I wonder why are people so much worried about documentation. Turris Omnia is running pretty much standard OpenWRT. So there is no magic involved: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/start
