Ask Slashdot: Which Router Firmware For Bandwidth Management?

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? _____?"

Comments

OpenWRT all the way

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:OpenWRT all the way

[AlphaWolf_HK]

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.

Re:OpenWRT all the way

[AlphaWolf_HK]

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

Out of scope I think but....

[Raxxon]

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.

Mikrotik?

[imag0]

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.