I know there are quite a few owners of Linksys/Buffalo routers here who are using 3rd-party firmware, so I thought I'd post a quick review of Tomato firmware. Someone posted a Digg story about it yesterday, and opinions of it seemed pretty high, so I gave it a shot.

In the past, I've tried everything from Sveasoft to Talisman to DD-WRT, and most recently, OpenWRT/X-Wrt, but never quite found true happiness. Some have clean web interfaces but no easy access to advanced features, some have the power user stuff but not the stability, but none have (in my opinion) hit the sweet spot between usability and functionality. Tomato pretty much hits that spot, for me at least.

The web interface seems a bit pedestrian at first glance, but it's got a lot of powerful configuration hidden beneath the surface. The "glitzy" feature of the web interface is the bandwidth monitor, which shows real-time SVG graphs of network traffic on any interface, or historical data from the last few hours, days, or whatever you want. Bandwidth data can even be logged to a CIFS share so you can keep long term historical data.

The QoS interface is magnificent as well. Not only can you fully configure QoS easily, but you can see pretty graphs of how your traffic is classified, which is helpful in setting up new filters. The interface makes extensive use of AJAX to make data entry easier, so you don't always have to submit a web form for every small change.

I can't think of a single major feature from the other firmware I've used that isn't present in Tomato, other than an NTP server (it's got an NTP client.) Port triggering, DMZ, RIP routing, DynDNS auto-update, ssh access, etc. are all there. I don't think there's any "package repository" for customizing Tomato like one does with OpenWRT, but I found the need to re-add my packages every time I upgraded OpenWRT to be more of a nuisance than it was worth.

Network speed and stability has improved as well. I was having problems with OpenWRT streaming content between the floors of my apartment, but now I can watch high quality streams from my ReplayTV upstairs without hiccups. Tomato has also fixed a problem I had where I'd get duplicate pings when using the WET bridge mode.

Anyway, my home network with 4 WRT54G units is running very happily with Tomato, and I don't think I'll be going back to OpenWRT anytime soon. If you're unhappy with your current firmware, I think it's worth a shot.