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The fun of installing custom router firmware (tomato, dd-wrt) - an introduction

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Shades:
FWIW, the most useful setting in Tomato that I think every router firmware should have is the one that lets you set it to reboot itself in the middle of the night every day. For me, that completely solved the problem of having to pull the power on the router when it started having  problems after a couple weeks of constant uptime.
-mwb1100 (August 04, 2013, 02:22 AM)
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You can buy timers that allow you to program the times you want it powered up. All you have to do is put the timer in the wall socket where your router draws its power from and put the plug from the router in the timer. These devices are around 10 euro's for a simple, indoors one.

A mechanical example and electronic ones. Both sites are in Dutch, but the text is not extensive (meaning: Google translate will be quite accurate) and its mostly pictures anyway.

4wd:
That *does* sound useful.  Though I really only get those problems after the cable goes down for some reason.  I wonder if it could sense that and reboot...-wraith808 (August 04, 2013, 08:13 AM)
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You may be able to modify the following to do it, (it runs on your router): Automatic Connection Repair (always_on.sh)

CWuestefeld:
the most useful setting in Tomato that I think every router firmware should have is the one that lets you set it to reboot itself in the middle of the night every day
-mwb1100 (August 04, 2013, 02:22 AM)
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I've been running DD-WRT for about a year, and I've had the router up for months at a time with no ill effect.

Does anybody out there have a pointer to a Tomato versus DD-WRT comparison, to help decide which I should use?

40hz:
^I've used both without incident for a few years now. And I haven't had much need to restart them although I still reboot once in a great while, more out of superstition and habit than anything else. I can't recall either hanging much unless the hardware they were running on was on its way out. Both seem equally capable and on par feature-wise.

I've pretty much standardized on Tomato primarily because I like their interface better. I have some DD-WRT boxes I'm still responsible for that I see zero reason to reflash with Tomato. DD-WRT is working just fine on them so they're welcome to stay as is.

YMMV.  :)

chatt15:
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).

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