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Ask Slashdot: Which Router Firmware For Bandwidth Management?

Posted by timothy on from the but-the-neighbors-will-object dept.

First time accepted submitter DeathByLlama (2813725) writes "Years ago I made the switch from DD-WRT to Tomato firmware for my Linksys router. I lost a couple features, but gained one of the best QoS and bandwidth management systems I have seen on a router to date. Admins can see graphs of current and historical bandwidth usage by IP, set minimum and maximum bandwidth limits by IP range, setup QoS rules, and see and filter graphs and lists of current connections by usage, class or source/destination — all from an elegantly designed GUI. This has allowed me to easily and intelligently allocate and adjust my network's bandwidth; when there is a problem, I can see where it's coming from and create rules around it. I'm currently using the Toastman's VPN Tomato firmware, which has about everything that I would want, except for one key thing: support for ARM-based routers (only Broadcom is supported). I have seen other firmware projects being actively developed in the last few years, so in picking a new 802.11ac router, I need to decide whether Tomato support is a deal-breaker. With solid bandwidth management as a priority, what firmware would you recommend? Stock Asuswrt? Asuswrt-Merlin? OpenWRT? DD-WRT? Tomato? _____?"

8 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. cfw by hypergreatthing · · Score: 3, Informative

    toastman?
    Aren't those builds really, really old?
    If you're going to use tomatousb, use shibby.
    Use merlin if you want custom firmware as close to stock looking as possible.

  2. OpenWRT all the way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    OpenWRT Is a real linux distro with package mgmt that spun out from the DD-WRT project. DD-WRT is really designed around the wrt54g and never really broke away from that model. Tomato and some other projects are front ends to OpenWRT. I think all the movement these days in this space comes from OpenWRT.

    1. Re:OpenWRT all the way by AlphaWolf_HK · · Score: 5, Informative

      Tomato is a fork of HyperWRT, not OpenWRT, and in fact has nothing to do with it. HyperWRT itself was a fork of the stock WRT54g firmware.

      OpenWRT is good, but not for the faint of heart. Tomato is suitable for everybody though, and in fact is IMO THE firmware to use if you are just all around unsure of which one to pick. I'd use Tomato over DD-WRT for many reasons, but the biggest one being a much cleaner UI (also in spite of what TFS says, Tomato actually has all of the same features as DD-WRT in addition to some extras; rather the author probably just isn't sure where to find the features he thought was missing.) Pretty much the only case I could ever think to take DD-WRT over tomato is that DD-WRT works on some hardware that Tomato does not; however if your router supports Tomato, there's no reason not to use it over DD-WRT.

      --
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    2. Re:OpenWRT all the way by AlphaWolf_HK · · Score: 5, Informative

      Dunno but I wouldn't use that anyways. Without even looking it up, I'd actually wager that Tomato 1.27 was last updated before the patch that made heartbleed possible ever existed, so it isn't even relevant.

      Tomato Shibby on the other hand is what you'd want, and yes, it definitely has that particular issue resolved as of the latest release:

      http://tomato.groov.pl/?p=595

      --
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  3. Shibby tomato mod by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Shibby recently announced an ARM branch of his tomato mod.
    http://tomato.groov.pl/?p=590

    The Shibby mod is fairly active, with updates every couple months. Use 117 for the OpenSSL heartbleed fix.

  4. Out of scope I think but.... by Raxxon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Personally I've been enjoying Mikrotik. I don't think it's in the range for you because I'm 98% sure you can't load it on your hardware (I have a RouterBoard-based router/AP) but it's been damn solid and gives me WAY more features that I really plan on using... If you plan on upgrading routers at some point I'd suggest looking at them.

  5. Mikrotik? by imag0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've had really good luck with my RB2011UAS-2HND-IN from Mikrotik. It's pretty easy to configure queues by interface, all the way down to tagging the packets and throttling down to individual TCP/UDP ports.

    Costs slightly more than a cheap home router, but you have something pretty sturdy and extremely flexible to work with.

  6. whatever you use, use HFSC by HighBit · · Score: 3, Informative

    I just use a fanless box (made by cappuccino pc, but there are other vendors too) with several ethernet ports (at least two for WAN and LAN) running standard debian.

    But then I apply linux's best-kept traffic shaping secret, HFSC. See https://gist.github.com/eqhmco... .You should be able to apply that same script to any linux distro or mini-distro.

    The idea is you do AQM first, and QoS only later or even not at all, to get both low-latency for interactive TCP sessions and throughput for bulk session.

    AQM is all about dropping packets to throttle TCP and prevent it from overwhelming your ISP's bandwidth caps. When done properly, it works amazingly well, and HFSC + SFQ can do it properly.