OpenWRTInvasion VS dnscrypt-proxy

Xiaomi Mi WiFi Router 4A Gigabit. And install openwrt using OpenWRTInvasion

You can use this repo to flash it without an eeprom programmer https://github.com/acecilia/OpenWRTInvasion

With that said, this router has been well documented in what it does before and after firmware modification, feel free to read for yourself: https://github.com/acecilia/OpenWRTInvasion

Long story short: The Xiaomi 4A Gigabit seems to be a perfect entry level OpenWRT router for a mere ~25-30 bucks. https://openwrt.org/inbox/toh/xiaomi/xiaomi_mi_router_4a_gigabit_edition Dual-core 880 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 16 MB Flash, 5 GHz acn. Installing OpenWRT wasn't as trivial as usually but still fairly simple if you simply follow that guide: https://github.com/acecilia/OpenWRTInvasion

This router does not yet have stable support and also you need to root it first. Check https://github.com/acecilia/OpenWRTInvasion for more and easy instructions. In general, this is not a great choice for OpenWRT.

If i follow the steps in this project until I can access the router with telnet. Can i install dnscrypt using telnet with default firmware?

There is more than one way to do this but I have decided to use dnscrypt-proxy. We will not be using dnscrypt for the dnscrypt protocol though you could elect to use that as the underlying DNS protocol. dnscrypt-proxy lets's us use a SOCKS5 proxy through which the DNS queries will be sent. We will use a Tor SOCKS5 proxy here. You can choose which protocols should be enabled and which ones should be disabled. There are two points:

I tried installing the RPM from the Fedora repos but it's out-of-date and there were no instructions on how to get it operational, so I went with the manual approach as per their wiki: https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Installation-linux

This is awesome, thanks -- going to look into that now. I found SmartDNS interesting and thought I would share it, it's pretty simple to setup. I can see why it's Chinese focused, they have "interesting" internet access over there :-).

I have been looking into DNS quite a bit lately (Unbound, etc), as DNS lookup performance has been pretty subpar lately. I'm in Perth, Australia, and we're pretty remote so our latency is meh at best, and Cloudflare performance has been all over the shop lately, I think they're having issues in WA). DNS can also cause really routing issues here sometimes as we get better latency to Singapore than Sydney, so we might get shunted off to SG.

I've also been using dnscrypt-proxy2 (https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy) for a while, but the above issues with Cloudflares DNS is what triggered me to look into other options.

I use a min-cache-ttl of 15 minutes, which seems to work well.

Thank you for sharing this tip about, looking into this now :).

Sure. I run dnscrypt_proxy behind a pihole. https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy