Installed Tomato Firmware, Loving it
I installed the Tomato firmware on my WRT54GL about 15 minutes ago. I was clenching my teeth, preparing for a long slog through the trenches of firmwaredom but I got a very pleasant surprise!
Installation was:
- download
- install firmware
- set the SSID and password
I was up in 5 minutes! W00t!
Now I’m wandering through the configuration and it all “just works”. I am very happy. I think I might have to make a donation to the project.
The main reason I needed to upgrade was that the Linksys firmware has this asinine problem: you can open specific ports in the firewall for services like FTP and VNC but you can’t set static DHCP IP addresses with the server, you’ve got to muck with the client computer’s settings. That is dumb. All the open source firmware does it, DD-WRT, Open-WRT etc… but Tomato promised to do it EASILY. And it succeeded.
5 stars for Tomato!
I now have
* Static IP addresses via DHCP
* realtime and historical bandwidth monitoring
* QoS
* a much prettier user interface than the Linksys firmware!
* an easy “wireless site survey” wifi monitoring tool to show me which wifi channels are least populated
* local DNS… I can speak to local machines by name instead of IP address :-)
* Wake on LAN built into the router! I should be able to configure it so I can turn on my computer and then access it remotely :-)
I am very impressed.
I haven’t been able to find one very important feature yet… bandwidth monitoring by IP address. I want to be able to answer the question, “Hey, I see there’s a lot of wifi traffic, who is slowing down my network with bittorrent?”
Looks like the latest version of gargoyle router(http://www.gargoyle-router.com), which is similar to tomato, has real-time bandwidth monitoring by IP address. No wake-on-lan though :-(
tviolet, thanks. Wow, it looks like Gargoyle Router added that functionality just yesterday. Groovy.
It very much looks like Tomato could do bandwidth monitoring by IP or MAC address. I see that you can track bandwidth usage in Tomato by MAC address when you are using QoS. Go to the QoS Classification tab and add a new rule tracking by “Src MAC”. But in its current state, that is certainly a terribly sub-optimal way of measuring bandwidth usage.
RE: wireless site survey
Wow, my router can see an astounding 23 other wireless networks though 16 of them offer terrible signal strength. 7 are on channel 6 and until I had done this survey, I had left my router on channel 6 as well. I just switched to the otherwise unoccupied channel 3. :-)
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