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Living Room / Re: The fun of installing custom router firmware (tomato, dd-wrt) - an introduction
« on: August 29, 2013, 02:02 AM »
I have used both Tomato and DD-WRT. Tomato has a simpler interface. It also works on a relatively small number of Broadcom-based routers. It appears to be stable and uses less router memory.
DD-WRT has more features and works on a broader set of routers. The feature that drives my use of DD-WRT is universal repeater mode. This is conceptually similar to multi-hop WDS. However the advantage is that each node can have it's own SSID and IP address range. The repeater essentially acts like a client to the upstream network and a separate AP to the downstream clients. I find this configuration more flexible and easier to troubleshoot.
Having said that, DD-WRT can be difficult to set up and manage. There are also many unstable releases and poorly documented features and bugs. Although it supports many routers, I find it most stable on Broadcom-based routers like the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 - still one of the best routers IMHO (no longer in production).
DD-WRT has more features and works on a broader set of routers. The feature that drives my use of DD-WRT is universal repeater mode. This is conceptually similar to multi-hop WDS. However the advantage is that each node can have it's own SSID and IP address range. The repeater essentially acts like a client to the upstream network and a separate AP to the downstream clients. I find this configuration more flexible and easier to troubleshoot.
Having said that, DD-WRT can be difficult to set up and manage. There are also many unstable releases and poorly documented features and bugs. Although it supports many routers, I find it most stable on Broadcom-based routers like the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 - still one of the best routers IMHO (no longer in production).