Linksys MR7350 OpenWRT vs Stock

The MR7350 is cheap device, with OpenWRT support.  The stock Linksys firmware pushes you to an "online" set up, this seems an unnecessary risky including in firmware when OpenWRT is available.  See: "needed to create an account with Linksys" as well as the DNS lookups that the stock firmware attempts.

The Environment 

Debian 11 multi NIC NUC, with each MR7350 connected into it's own wired ethernet.  Debian 11 has a wireless "uplink" with IP forwarding configured and NATs all egress traffic.

DNSMasq was used to provide basic DHCP.

OpenWRT

dnsmasq -a 10.0.1.1 -d -i enp1s0 -I lo --bind-interfaces -F 10.0.1.10,10.0.1.20

Stock 

dnsmasq -a 10.0.2.1 -d -i enp2s0 -I lo --bind-interfaces -F 10.0.2.10,10.0.2.20

Findings

Noise

Without any configuration the stock firmware produced 3 X the amount of traffic in the first hour than did OpenWRT.  

Boot Time

The OpenWRT unit was up and actively working in less than 20s after a reboot.  The stock unit took over a minute.  (18s vs 64s to DHCP).

OpenWRT After Boot

5 packets per minute, only one address was looked up and not a single TCP exchange.

A ?.openwrt.pool.ntp.org   

Stock Linksys After Boot

14 packets per minute, with these addresses looked up:

A freegeoip.net
A heartbeat.belkin.com
A update1.linksys.com
A www.belkin.com
A cloud1.linksyssmartwifi.com

freegeoip.net

The device sent it's internet IP address to freegeoip.net, this seems pointless and might indicate either carelessness or a less-than-ideal attitude to privacy.

10.0.2.18    15.197.148.33    HTTP    156    GET /xml/10.0.2.18 HTTP/1.1 

Configuration

It doesn't seem the MR7350 can do 802.1Q can on the stock firmware, or at least I could see no way of creating multiple tagged VLAN interfaces.  There is mention of tagging for PPPoE on the WAN port.

I want a tagged VLAN per SSID.  

The hardware can do it.