Slashdot Mirror

A VPN? To connect to where, from where? Are you doing this for something to do, or because you want to implement the best solution? Do you just want better router software?

Install Tomato or DD or OpenWRT or any one of their variants on your existing router.

Building your own in the name of security isn't going to work unless you really know what you're doing, which you said you don't in your summary. That sounds like a dick thing to say, but it's not. Security is difficult for people that know what they're doing, when people who don't try to DIY it, it's almost universally bad.

I will add to that and say that the pros that do know what they are doing still use the easiest solution whenever they can, not some convoluted mess. If you're doing it to learn that's one thing, if you're doing this as a noob to protect yourself somehow, stop!

A VPN? To connect to where, from where? Are you doing this for something to do, or because you want to implement the best solution? Do you just want better router software?

Install Tomato or DD or OpenWRT or any one of their variants on your existing router.

Building your own in the name of security isn't going to work unless you really know what you're doing, which you said you don't in your summary. That sounds like a dick thing to say, but it's not. Security is difficult for people that know what they're doing, when people who don't try to DIY it, it's almost universally bad.

Just FYI - I had a lot of trouble finding instructions. So here you go:
http://tomatousb.org/forum/t-2...

I used Lassik's instructions (multiple posts). And yes, I only found the firmware on the 4shared site:
http://www.4shared.com/dir/v1B...

I use a build of Tomato by Shibby on my Asus "Black Knight" RT-N66U . It has tons of features and is easy to setup. You could also try some of the other Tomato builds.

http://tomatousb.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato_(firmware)

It looks like this could work well with a Synology configured for disk redundancy, plus a home router with VPN (dd-wrt or tomato).

I had the same issue, I wanted Gigabit Ethernet and stumbled upon tomatousb during my research. It works really well together with the Netgear WNR3500L.
It can share a USB HDD via SMB has really good 802.11n tuning and loads of other special features (like VPN and DLNA).
http://tomatousb.org/

Had a Asus RT-16n with Tomato for over a year with only power outages for downtime.
Like the other poster said, go to http://tomatousb.org/ for all the latest info.

3rd for this router. I'm using this as a router + qos + asterisk box for the in-laws. I set them up to have all IP phones connecting to this router and then the router registering with vitelity for phone service. Great setup and saves them a lot of money compared to the bells. The router has 128MB of ram and 32MB of flash so it is one of the most powerful and has the most space for adding stuff than most other routers. I also setup a vpn connection to my house and some custom routing so I can directly access their internal subnet from my computers and diagnose if necessary.

Router is flashed with tomato and then loaded with Optware in order to install asterisk and other addons. Here are some steps to get this done. One side item, the guide for optware has you install it on an external USB drive. But I installed it directly on the /jffs partition so you don't need to add a usb drive. The router has plenty of space to add data to it so I just used this. Also, if you want to do any custom linux commands in tomato, the root os doesn't preserve state after reboot. So be sure to put all the commands you want run in the web gui under administration->scripts. Custom routing commands will need to go there since tomato is limited in the custom routing you can do with the gui (no interface routing? bah)
--Install tomato: http://tomatousb.org/tut:installing-on-asus-rt-n16
--Install optware: http://tomatousb.org/tut:optware-installation

3rd for this router. I'm using this as a router + qos + asterisk box for the in-laws. I set them up to have all IP phones connecting to this router and then the router registering with vitelity for phone service. Great setup and saves them a lot of money compared to the bells. The router has 128MB of ram and 32MB of flash so it is one of the most powerful and has the most space for adding stuff than most other routers. I also setup a vpn connection to my house and some custom routing so I can directly access their internal subnet from my computers and diagnose if necessary.

Router is flashed with tomato and then loaded with Optware in order to install asterisk and other addons. Here are some steps to get this done. One side item, the guide for optware has you install it on an external USB drive. But I installed it directly on the /jffs partition so you don't need to add a usb drive. The router has plenty of space to add data to it so I just used this. Also, if you want to do any custom linux commands in tomato, the root os doesn't preserve state after reboot. So be sure to put all the commands you want run in the web gui under administration->scripts. Custom routing commands will need to go there since tomato is limited in the custom routing you can do with the gui (no interface routing? bah)
--Install tomato: http://tomatousb.org/tut:installing-on-asus-rt-n16
--Install optware: http://tomatousb.org/tut:optware-installation

I've been a long-time DD-WRT user, but its development seemed to stagnate.

The last release of TomatoUSB was over a year ago. My own version of DD-WRT dates from about the same time. I don't see how you can hold the former up as making more progress than the latter.

I've been a long-time DD-WRT user, but its development seemed to stagnate. I recently put TomatoUSB on my Linksys WRT160N v1, and it is working wonderfully. The interface is much nicer, and exposes more QoS and bandwidth management features which I've found useful. Check out the TomatoUSB website for a list of routers it supports.

The buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH meets all of these requirements and ships with DD-WRT. However, as the last, very recent thread mentioned DD-WRT is not well maintained anymore. Your best bets are either TomatoUSB or straightforward OpenWRT. I prefer openwrt because it allows simple configuration of hardware taged vlans.

However, capping the upload speed to something ridiculously low (10-30 k/sec) seems to fix the problem.

It makes me wonder if the upstream pipe is just saturated with all the connections made in the P2P network.

It's that, and the fact that higher upstream traffic causes higher (corresponding) downstream traffic. In fact, manipulating upstream traffic is exactly how linux QoS works. This is a very well-written guide:

http://tomatousb.org/tut:using-tomato-s-qos-system

You should look into getting a router that supports third-party linux firmware with QoS, like Tomato and TomatoUSB (not DDWRT, its QoS GUI (among other things) is long-broken with no fix in sight). Then you can not only cap your upstream traffic, but also give priority to certain traffic (such as DNS, HTTP, IRC, POP, IMAP, etc.) so that your internet connection is always responsive no matter what you're doing.

Misinformation.

Latest versions for DD-WRT is June 2011, while the latest version for Tomato TomatoUSB was released November 2010.

Not sure what is meant by "unofficial", since the entire project is is community driven. Also, Tomato is only available to a severly limited set of routers, not including the mentioned WNDR3700, as far as I know.

TomatoUSB is a bit stale now too, but someone named Toastman is continuing to improve his own fork of it: http://tomatousb.org/forum/t-379538/new-toastman-builds

I like that it comes with some good out-of-the-box QoS settings, although they're perhaps a bit harsh for a small home LAN.

I was thinking of the usb variation, haven't checked original for a while: lite is 4MB? http://tomatousb.org/doc:build-types

Tomato seems to be a little stale, at the moment. See TomatoUSB: http://tomatousb.org/

I have to cron reboot my tomato router daily and it still goes into the ozone sometimes.
Any advice for upgrading from tomato to tomato-usb (no-usb) on a WRT54GS from someone who's tried that route?
I spent some time at the tomato-usb site so I saved nvram off box for reference and will save away the various config pages. So just firmware upgrade to the 2.4kernel no-usb build and 30-30-30 reset?

Leave it to InfoWeek to be both completely confused and 5 years behind the times.

To wit, this article with the same premise from Lifehacker in 2006. And that was before DD-WRT sucked.

First, the author's router is not "an old router". In fact, it ships with DD-WRT. Take an old WRT-54G 1.0 and stick DD-WRT and that would be breathing life into an old router. All you're doing here is using a Buffalo-preconfigured (and encrypted, closed-source) version of DD-WRT.

But more to the point...DD-WRT? Ick. If you want QoS (as the author seems to), you need pay for the commercial version. The QoS in the free version is known broken and has been for quite a while, and there is little motivation to fix it. Also, old routers cannot use the QoS, because you need 4MB or bigger flash. Maybe it works in newer routers but who cares - there are plenty of better alternatives to DD-WRT.

Finally, for Slashdotters, let me say two words that will have you running screaming from DD-WRT: software activation.

Tomato is a fine, free (in all senses) alternative, and I personally love the Tomato-USB version.

Count me in the Tomato group.. and there is finally a group providing support for tomato on newer routers: TomatoUSB Like the ever present Linksys E2000 and E3000 line.

Tomato ( http://tomatousb.org/ ) can do QoS. It's kind of complicated though, and it doesn't let you set up multiple SSIDs.

There are also variants of the "Tomato" firmware with IPv6 support as well, which some people might find simpler to deal with.