What to do from here

General discussion
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Okay, very early backer here in the US.

When I committed to the Turris Omnia I thought we’d be delivered a working and fully functional and exceptional router.

The reality is that I’m not remotely confident that the TO will not do anything out of the box that I desire.

I’ve provisioned 2 8TB sata drives, a msata ssd with 256GB capacity and am shopping around for a new wifi adapter to accomodate the storage strategy.

It appears that the rule right now is that the TO is not ready for primetime. My expecations were that we’d get a stable router and the enhancements built in - NAS connectivity, tweaking the wifi, lx containers would all be sorted out well before production and distribution of this device goes out to it’s backers.

In summary I expected a stable OS and Hardware that in which I can customize beyond what I consider base functionalty - routing, security, NAS, wifi and using the traditional tools to acheive such.

This morning after reviewing in detail all the issues surrounding base functionaly I am very disappointed in the problems that the other backers are encountering with what I would consider base functionality.

So in summary, I’m quite redicent to unbox and assemble my new TO because it appears that all the curent issues are being addressed by the user community without the beneifit of real development that should have been resolved much sooner than the delivery of this device.

I’ll ask the community to put forward suggestions to CZ to identify and resolve these basic problems but until I get a good sense that we’re all on the same page, I do not plan on unboxing the TO nor attempting to configure to my intent as everywhere on this forum the backers are putting a lot of time to bring this device into it’s very basic form.

I’m not happy and very disappointed.

At what point can a backer expect these fundamental problems to be addressed?

At what point can a backer expect some very basic tutorials to facilitate the very basic steps in deploying this device as designed?

I’m loathe to even start as I didn’t sign up for any sort of development responsibilities. Rolling a new product out is painful if it cannot even do the basic tasks that it was designed to do. Again, just basic functionality is fleeting at this point and if it goes on much longer, I’ll be returning this box with all the perks back to CZ.

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Hi there. I’m no linux wizzard, neither do i dream of this openWRT luci thing. But t’s hanging here ( straight out of the box ) behind a cable modem, and does what it should do. I did have some wifi drops, but these stopped since 5 days.
I managed to install and run majordomo today, and got the whole ssh honeypot working.

So, so far, so good. I expected less to be honest, since these people are no big mfg, and i think it will take some months to get it all up and running. This baby is fast, very fast.
So, i think you should give them time to sort all the child diseases out?

Best, DIKKE

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There are problems… yes. However with that said, I’m a work from home Software developer who relies on this 100% (and have 9 people in the house using the connection all day).

Thus far the router DOES WORK. I have it load balancing two internet connections, and after fairly heavy use for the past week i would say it IS usable and it does work well (for me).

That does not mean there are not disappointments, i think the forum shows that. The main thing here that would help is have some kind of official communication from CZ as to how they plan to address the issues as its been mostly quiet up till now.

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They massively underestimated the demand and effort they needed to put into this project. The Omnia at this point is barely usable unless you have the patience to continue tweaking it from the command line to convince it to work for the time being. Additionally, the total absence of the Turris team here speaks volumes. You should try emailing their support email to see exactly how little the care about their customers.

At this point our best hope is that the TO specific bits are upstreamed immediately so the community can work on making it functional with openwrt.

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5

Well, i would never ever use & run a kickstarter/indigo project that just came out as a main & solid device i would depend on. Since one can expect all the trouble that you know you will get if you participate in a project like this.
Therefore i have my old router standby, cause i expected the TO to be buggy. Hell, even my old router ( synology ) needed 6 months to get some sort of stable FW. And that is a mucho bigger company, with 20 times more teccies writing software.

The thing with the TO can be, that it has so many options and possibilities, that the guys and girls from CZ get all the trouble from day 1. A brave choice, but also a bigger bug pool to fish in. I liked that type of ‘‘design’’, but it will also mean a longer de-bugging route.

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Well, IMHO there are not any Major bugs, it just needs a bit polishing and refinement.

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Honestly, I don’t think there are any critical problems.

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I’ve rolled out many software and hardware platforms from womb to tomb so I have considerable experience with the “process”. My main complaint is that functionality and features were sold to the backers that isn’t remotely possible without considerable hacking and real time discovery and effort put on the backers.

If this was a period declared as a beta test, then say so !

Where are the FAQ’s ?

Where is the documentation?

Where is there any control on the downstream updates?

What are the downstream updates?

Why are we - backers - working almost independently on the same issues?

What the process for tracking bugs?

Whats the process for communicating the basic fixes to the VERY BASIC ISSUES?

How are the reported problems being identified, tracked and addressed?

How are the problems being prioritized?

This is shameful and from my 40 years experience in systems I’ve never seen a roll out so messy and unorganized when in fact this CZ group has had nearly 2 years to develop the TO O/S.

Again, I didn’t sign up to be a beta tester but it’s clear at this point I need to put several if not dozens of hours into something thats a treasure hunt.

CZ Team, talk to us!

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If one router goes down in a mission critical application, that is CRITICAL

Time for some candor from the CZ Team as Bad effort after good is not the road I think many of us would traverse.

I don’t expect it to be perfect out of the box but my confidence in the TO is greatly diminished and my time cost $$$.

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It is yet to go down for me unexpectedly, while I’m using it quite heavily.

What I really wish though is a faster update process. For example, the package feed is almost half a year behind upstream, without a good reason.

Regarding bug tracking:

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Yep, that really sucks. I hope this gets fixed soon! Very soon.

Upstreaming the changes would also help a lot. The community is usually happy to support new devices, but it will not jump on a forked repo months behind upstream. So, instead maintaining tens of patches, just upstream the changes to OpenWRT or LEDE. It will make life easier for all of us, especially for NIC.CZ, as the diff gets smaller and smaller over time. Has worked for many others before, will work for NIC.CZ as well.

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12

The Omnia is a brand new device in a brand new ecosystem, and I think it’s unreasonable to expect that everything will work flawlessly from day one. That being said, I have yet to encounter a bug. My configuration is rather complex (several VLANs with custom DHCP parameters on WAN side, IGMP proxy, three VPN tunnels with different routing rules, LXC container to collect logs, etc.) and everything works great!

Most of the issues reported on this forum are actually user errors, and that’s OK. The community is here to help. I think CZ.NIC have somewhat overpromised when it comes to the web interface (Foris and LuCI), but it’s not worse than other OpenWRT-based routers.

As for the documentation, most things are already documented on the OpenWRT website. Almost all OpenWRT tutorials and howtos apply to the Omnia, too!

If you don’t mind tinkering with the Linux command line and learning how things actually work, give the Omnia a try. I’m sure it will be a very rewarding experience for you. You will gain a better understanding of your network and the services your router provides, and your configuration will fit exactly your needs. If you expect configuration wizards, the Omnia is probably not the right device for you.

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What do you mean by ecosystem and how is it brand new? CPE routers have been here for decades.

Not that I need wizards, but as I remember it was part of the stretch goal. So acting surprised that people actually demand the wizards feels weird.

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By ecosystem, I mean developer involvement, the community, user-contributed guides, additional software tools, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it was a big mistake to promise so many features as part of the stretch goals, but it was your responsibility as a backer to assess their feasibility. I think many people expected a polished user interface like you can find in Synology devices or pfSense, but these projects took years to reach an acceptable level of usability.

BTW the fears that CZ.NIC have given up on the project are unfounded. In fact, they are looking for new employees to work on the Omnia and provide support: https://www.startupjobs.cz/nabidka+/7864/partak-cka-uzivatelu-turrisu-omnia

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Hi Guys,

Sorry to jump in here as Linux is a black art to me.and you seem like a knowledgable bunch
My Omnia still cannot connect to the network "Where do I go from here"
I have rebooted it many times, reflashed it with the latest OS
Everything that I connect to my Cable modem picks up an IP apart from the Turris.
Am I missing something that is right in front of my nose?

Regards

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Did you have rebooted your modem?

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I’ll throw my two cents in here to Mr. Colorado:

I agree that the Omnia isn’t the kind of device to be handed to a non-technically inclined individual. This isn’t a mass-consumer router. I’ve struggled with it over the past several days, and there have been some perplexing, head-scratching moments for me. But while I’ve been frustrated at times, I’ve also honestly been surprised and pleased (Schnapps snapshot backup is pretty cool, for above reasons, lol.) If you bought this router, thinking that this was the equivalent of a Linksys, to simply plug in and forget, then I think you’ve misread the campaign.

Please don’t take that as a critical remark or an attack–I’m not some cz.nic fanboy fervently jumping to their defense, and I appreciate and acknowledge the validity of your concerns. Again, however, my take on the project was that it was a small group of nerds reaching out to a larger group of nerds and saying “Hey, we want to build a super-router with great hardware specs, who’s in?” While they’ve been somewhat silent in the past few weeks, I appreciated their constant efforts to update, which is not the norm for a crowdfunded campaign (look at Navdy, for instance. Jerks!)

If you’ve been browsing the issues, then you’ve probably seen some of my posts. From your posts, you seem qualified enough that none of my issues would even slow you down, so I think you’ve got the advantage. I’m a technically interested guy who just likes to tinker and figure stuff out. And so far, my conceptualization of this project has held true: it truly is a community effort to get this piece of hardware working in new and fulfilling ways. I’ve received plenty of hints and suggestions (thanks to everyone for that), and I’m confident that I will continue to do so. I’d like to see you,Mr. Colorado get your hands dirty on this, because it sounds like you have some valuable experience to contribute as well. Should you be required to do so? No. Is your viewpoint that you want to be able to plug it in with out issue invalid–certainly not. I just encourage you to look at the campaign the way I did: we’re buying hardware, the raw materials; it is cz.nic’s responsibility to provide a working firmware, and I think they’ve done that. I think the polish, however, and the true tweaking, is up to everyone to work on together and share.

Okay, that was way longer than I intended, and I hope it doesn’t come across as preachy–the intent was more of a “come on in, the water’s fine!” sort of thing.

Cheers,

Chris

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I’d love to hear more about the critical issues since my experience has been nothing but positive once I figured a few tweaks that were needed to meet my specific situation.

I’ve been using OpenWRT for years and pretty much bypassed that Foris front end, went straight to the CLI and LuCI and configured the device. It’s running 3 VLANs with all the firewalling that entails, no wifi ( that’s handled in the house by other devices), lots of static DHCP addresses, SNMP set up and all being monitored by Nagios. No problems so far. Did it work out the box when I plugged it in? Yes. Did it work out the box exactly as I needed it to ? No, but then that’s why I love OpenWRT rather than some proprietary cr*p. I made the appropriate config changes and put it into production. It’s doing fine at the moment.

Being a ‘proud’ owner of a Linksys WRT1900AC and a survivor of the early OpenWRT deploys on that device, it was great to see the T/O device deliver pretty much what was promised. Perfect? No. Usable? Yes. Maybe I just like hacking stuff :wink:

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Yes I rebooted my modem, I have had it in modem mode and router mode.
EvrythingI connect to it in both modes picks up an IP except the Omni when set to DHCP Client mode.

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Well, I did sign up because;
I am sick and tired of closed source machines in plastic sealed boxes that one sets up to protect self and family only to find that it has doors and windows everywhere!

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