Not many people know it, but there are a lot of open source/3rd party firmware projects available for those popular Linksys router/switch/wireless access point/place to plug in wires many people own. To most, it’s just another box with flashing lights you need to occasionally unplug and plug back in when your ISP says to do so or you have internet problems. To us geeks, its a playground!
I’m not a n00b at hacking my hardware with new firmware as I have run DD-WRT (another 3rd party firmware) for over a year without too many problems. Unfortunately after a recent service pack however, my router had gotten very unstable. So when Adam let me know about Tomato, I was excited to try something new. This firmware package stressed speed, a small footprint, and promised QoS management & a bunch of powerful real-time AJAX powered applets & graphs. I was not disappointed!
With very little effort I was flashed and upgraded from one 3rd party to another, and after refreshing the browser after the upgrade I was up and running. The only conversion issue I was was that I needed to reset the wireless settings; no big deal.
The customizable QoS pies have allowed me to fix some pesky problems when running torrents, and overall my little network is running a million times more smoothly; most importantly the semi-weekly router reboot and/or service drop seems to be resolved! Best of all, I now have some seriously dorky stats/graphing capabilities!!
I would definitely recommend this firmware to anyone who might be interesting in tweaking their network that has one of the Linksys WRT routers. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for future versions…
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