{"id":281,"date":"2008-10-20T21:52:02","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T04:52:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/?p=281"},"modified":"2008-10-20T21:52:02","modified_gmt":"2008-10-21T04:52:02","slug":"routed-out-review-of-tomato-firmware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/routed-out-review-of-tomato-firmware\/","title":{"rendered":"routed out : review of Tomato firmware"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/image.png\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px\" height=\"158\" alt=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/image-thumb.png\" width=\"253\" border=\"0\"><\/a> <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been battling with my router for the last few months.&nbsp; Today I won thanks to some handy replacement firmware.&nbsp; It&#8217;s rare that I encounter a technology that I immediately love because it &#8220;just works&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><em>Tomato (<\/em><a title=\"http:\/\/www.polarcloud.com\/tomato\/\" href=\"http:\/\/www.polarcloud.com\/tomato\/\"><em>http:\/\/www.polarcloud.com\/tomato\/<\/em><\/a><em>) just works.<\/em>&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p><!--more--> <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s freeware replacement firmware for the Linksys WRT54G router, among others.&nbsp; I&#8217;m lucky enough to have an old enough router that works with a lot of the freeware firmware out there.&nbsp; After a quick review, I chose Tomato because it&#8217;s simple, has a basic GUI, and covers some really neat features:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Super simple setup; just install, tweak the settings to your desire, and you&#8217;re off and running.<\/li>\n<li>You can easily can turn the router into an access point (in under 4 clicks), for when I get another router I can use this as the access to my XBox to get on the web.<\/li>\n<li>Bandwidth monitoring<\/li>\n<li>Increased # of P2P connections<\/li>\n<li>Much more flexible port-forwarding &amp; QOS features<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One of the nicest features is that it allows the router to discover what channels the other routers in your area are on and let you select a free channel (most routers come defaulted to Ch. 1, 5, or 11&#8230; from my house, each of those had 5 access points <em>each <\/em>on those channels&#8230; yikes!)&nbsp; I&#8217;m noticing that my top-speeds on downloads are 50-100KB\/sec faster than on the older firmware.&nbsp; YMMV.<\/p>\n<p>(FYI: The main reason I had to blow away the old firmware was that the DHCP server was busted&#8230; every time I unplugged it, it would not release\/renew properly.&nbsp; No machine connected to it could get to the web, even though I could ping out from the router itself.&nbsp;&nbsp; Even after reflashing firmware to the same version, it would have the same problem.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been battling with my router for the last few months.&nbsp; Today I won thanks to some handy replacement firmware.&nbsp; It&#8217;s rare that I encounter a technology that I immediately love because it &#8220;just works&#8221;. Tomato (http:\/\/www.polarcloud.com\/tomato\/) just works.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[352,119,159,160],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","tag-geek","tag-review","tag-tomato","tag-wrt54g"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}