Tomato Firmware with USB support

[teddy_bear]

Recently I made a custom Tomato firmware mod with included basic USB and NAS support. Although this forum is mostly dedicated to Oleg's and Asus official firmware, I finally decided to register and post here since most USB-enabled routers are now made by Asus, and my mod will provide another alternative to Asus owners. Hopefully it's not inappropriate to post it here.

First of all I would like to thank Oleg, lly and other developers who are working on a new firmware here for making this project open source. I've been looking around for good solutions and fixes, and using some of your patches and code really helped me a lot in making my mod better.

For those unfamiliar with Tomato firmware, the official Tomato homepage is http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato. My USB mod and related discussion can be found on the Linksysinfo forums.

Of course, even with USB additions, Tomato doesn't include many of the features available in Oleg's firmware. There's no SNMP, no support for USB serial devices, webcams, modems etc. With my USB mod I'm only focusing on printing and storage support. On the other hand, Tomato has nicier GUI, and arguably the best QoS implementation among all the available open source firmwares with very good graphs to go along with it. Depending on your needs and preferences you can choose one or the other - but I believe it's always better to have more choices ...

If you want to ask questions it may be better to post them on the existing thread on Linksysinfo forum rather than here - I'm visiting it more often, and there's already a whole subforum dedicated to Tomato there.

[theMIROn]

First of all I would like to thank Oleg, lly and other developers who are working on a new firmware here for making this project open source. I've been looking around for good solutions and fixes, and using some of your patches and code really helped me a lot in making my mod better.

That's nice. We've been looking around too, and recently lly did some backports from Tomato SpeedMod. It looks like you have better implementation with new kernel (you're using 2.4.35, right?) Could you help us to integrate your patches into 1.9.2.7 (http://repo.or.cz/w/tomato.git?a=com...6bed00c3244add, http://repo.or.cz/w/tomato.git?a=com...d6c06091c06655, etc)?

[Lesiuk]

Yeah, that is good idea.

[lly]

theMIROn
Pointed commisets are already present in 2.4.37 kernel. So, they exists in 1.9.2.7-d firmware too.

[theMIROn]

theMIROn
Pointed commisets are already present in 2.4.37 kernel. So, they exists in 1.9.2.7-d firmware too.

Oh, i see, had a quick look.
Anyway there's good QoS implementation

[teddy_bear]

It looks like you have better implementation with new kernel (you're using 2.4.35, right?)

No, unfortunately Tomato is based on 2.4.20 kernel. The "Speedmod" though includes a lot of backports from 2.4.35, but since you're already at ver. 2.4.37 you don't need all of that. I looked at your implementatoin, and it seems that you've done all what's needed. You also used different values for some constants - do they give better results than the original Rodney's values? Rodney (the original speedmod author) has a blog here - if you want to discuss it with him.

By the way I wish Tomato author updates the kernel too - in order to make USB to work relatively stable I had to port the whole USB driver back from 2.4.35, and almost all FAT/Ext2/Ext3 support code too .

[msj33]

Will Tomato work with existing guides on this forum?

For example:
Samba
Rtorrent
Vsftp
Cron
etc.

What about perfomance? On my WL500 G Deluxe i have speed issues due the the low CPU performance. Will this be slightly increased with Tomato?

I'll will only change to Tomato if I have the same stability, features and hopefully a better CPU performance on Torrent files, and FTP transfers.

/Morten

[teddy_bear]

I'll will only change to Tomato if I have the same stability, features and hopefully a better performance

You don't have to ! I can't guarantee you anything, and I don't know if Tomato will work better for you or not. Read the Tomato official site and the other thread (links are in the 1st post) for overview of features included, and try it if you want. You can always go back to whatever firmware you're using now.

[cMcd01]

I've been using Tomato on my primary router (and WDS client router) for over a year and I am very happy. When I recently acquired the Asus WL-500W I added it as an AP and loaded Oleg, because Tomato doesn't support draft N wi-fi. I'm currently in the process of learning Oleg f/w - I've attached a USB hard drive with Samba and I'm exploring adding ftp, http, and possibly media servers.

When teddy_bear added USB support to Tomato, I was very interested but decided to go Oleg given the N support. But Tomato is great and remains on my primary router (Internet gateway).

[direction]

Does this firmware work on other routers of ASUS?
like WL-500W?

[teddy_bear]

direction,
Tomato doesn't officially support N-routers. However, it works on wl-500w in g-mode. Check this post and the following 2 for details.

[direction]

thanks teddy_bear,
I have read some infromation in the linksys forum.
It seems there is no open source firmware support 802.11n?
and can I use the asus webUI to upgrade for this firmware?

[maurer]

Can I put this firmware on a wl-500gx (deluxe) ?

[kapkap]

teddy_bear,

I am already using a modified version of Tomato (with VPN) on my ASUS 500g V2. I was looking into the possibility of connecting a Drobo to my router instead of buying the $200 DroboShare.

I'm not very linux savvy, but is it possible to add the USB functionality without flashing the entire firmware?

[teddy_bear]

kapkap,
No, you have to flash the entire firmware to gain additional functionality. I have also released a variation of USB Tomato mod merged with Keith' VPN mod - go to the thread on Linksysinfo forum for download links for the latest build (34).