Tell me about tomato

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Aberdeen, Scotland
My dg834gt seems to be slowly dying on me. I've had it for 4 years, though 2m, 8m and now be* 11m and it's always done well, though it had an annoying tendency to drop the wired lan pcs occasionally it was rare and easy to live with. Unfortunately it's become increasing common this past month, where it's doing it 3/4 times a day (switch is dying :() and need replaced. Now I've been offered a wrt54gl for £15 and suggested to bridge the bebox and install tomato on it. Seems logical.

However i have never touched anything linksys in my life, nor tomato. I constantly hear good thing about both, and the bonus of qos is appealing, but I'd really like to hear from people with first hand experience doing this (be would be ideal). Just how good are these little routers and just how reliable are they? Will i be able to leave it no 24/7 without issues like the dg and just how god is tomato, moving from the dgteams firmware?
 
Hi,

I have a linksys WRG54g and with the default linksys firmware is was 100% rock solid all the time, never crashed or had to reboot it at all was was runnign 24/7 with myself, wife and 2 kids using it, with not only PCs by Xbox and Wii too.

Quite a while ago I put the Tomato firmware on and again no issues at all, its still running 24/7 without any problems.

I have not used the QoS feature, but find the WOL option really useful for booting up my spare PC at home and logging on to it (worked a treat when I was in Zew Zealand earlier this year).

Diddy
 
I run Tomato on a WRT54GL and have to agree with Diddy. Uptime is measured in months, not days or weeks. In fact I ended up giving it to my mum as they have VM cable, whereas I was bridging an AM200 ADSL2+ modem to it.

They live 25 miles away and my visits aren't all that frequent, so anything 'techy' has to be set and forget else they'll be ringing me up all day and night in confusion :p It's been running 24/7 for almost a year, and 'just works'. I update the firmware periodically when I visit, but apart from that it serves their LAN (three computers and a laptop) for Usenet downloads, torrents, multimedia streaming and remote desktop flawlessly.

Rock solid, nice UI (AJAX based) and fast. What more do you want? :D Personally I'd snatch your mate's hand off - £15 for a WRT is peanuts, you'd pay 3x that anywhere else. Personally I recommend Victek's Tomato mod, which is the latest 'official' Tomato firmware but with updated busybox, the speedmod patched onto it and some extra tweaks (contrack etc) for extra speed and reliability under massive numbers of connections (torrents, usenet).

You can read more about Tomato and its installation and use in their handbook/wiki, here. There are plenty of forums and sites out there if you need any guides.

Put it this way, if you don't want the WRT for £15, I'll have it and pay postage for sure! :p :D
 
Yup...

Fully tomato'd up here too.. and as with other people it's been the most reliable router I've ever used.

It has had the odd hiccup, but compared to the numerous thompson/Draytek/Netgear stuff it's in another league..

Nothings perfect, but for the money, it's really can't be faulted.
 
used tomato on my linksys WRT54 with VM, rock solid, lovely interface.

i am now on O2 so now using a 834GT with DGTeam Firmware, not had it long so cant commnet on uptime but seems good so far.
 
Cheers for that mod link Rainmaker, will give that a go tonight.

As all have said, can't recommend this firmware enough. Seriously stable, massively configurable and the bandwidth monitoring/shaping/QoS tools are excellent. Can't fault this at all, just wish the hardware supported Gb LAN and N. wifi.
 
Well the lack of documentation is somewhat irritating :)

I have everything sorted except the basic outbound qos settings, I don't understand what the two columns are for. I'm assuming the one of the right, all set to 100% is the maximum, but what's the one on the left and how does it relate tot he former? If the default of highest is 80-100% does that mean that it will receive 80-100 when it needs it or that it always gets 80 minimum i.e. if it's active everything else only gets 20?

Google isn't much help here :(

*confused*
 
Thanks for that but that still leave me assuming :( From what i gather the left column controls the guaranteed amount (assuming a higher process doesn't need it) and the right the max. Is that correct?

If that's true then the defaults basically want all the low latency apps in the highest (80%) and expect everything else graded beneath which means I'll end up putting Skype, ts, vent, xbox, ps3 plus various pc games all in a single category. Would it be better to increase the bandwidth of the high category to and put the games in it and voip in highest or shove everything in highest and let the router sort it out?
 
Just posting here to add my support for the tomato firmware, I thought dd-wrt was good.

I have VM 50mbit and with a WRT54GL running tomato my uptime is 9 days and counting since first power up. No problems what so ever maxing out the connection, the thing is rock solid and can handle a crazy amount of continuous connections without breaking a sweat.

Bandwidth and QoS options and features are so impressive. All round once you have a router running Tomato you won't want to go back to anything else. It turns what is home consumer based hardware to the next level.
 
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Hi again.

I had an up time of 55 days of Tomato.

Today my net suddenly stopped working. So I thought hrmm tomato is prob fine but restarted router anyway to see.. no change in connectivity.

Restarted my cable modem and ha! My modem is now the weakest link in the chain of hardware lol

Seriously! Tomato is worth shouting about.

My old router would drop out and die when watching a peer to peer video stream, you could not do anything else net related. But Tomato marches on.

Tomato is hard to the core.
 
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There is actually a netgear n/gigabit that runs it but you only get/10/100 speed.

Teddybear & some other are working on the 2.6 kernel, it's getting close :D Now if asus would hurry up and get the RT-N16 on the uk market we'd be set...
 
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