I first heard about the Linksys WRT54G from The Pulpit of Robert Cringely several years ago. I bought it knowing that I could replace the stock firmware with an open source firmware since the firmware was based on Linux. I chickened out. I was too worried that I would make a brick of my only router.

With a little encouragement from my wife I recently took the plunge. The happy ending: everything worked flawlessly and everything has been fantastic.

I chose Tomato and have found that it is freakin’ awesome.

Some features I like:

• Dynamic SVG graphs
• dnsmasq (your own lightweight DNS)
• very few (if any) changes in settings require a restart
• logs, so you can actually know what’s going on
• throughput performance has improved
• Quality of Service—I thought I’d need this to give my Vonage phone priority but I haven’t had any issues with the default settings
• I finally know how much bandwidth I’m using

Real time svg graphs of iChat video conference in Tomato.

The picture is of the real-time graph. You can see where the bandwidth was pushing 2 megabits for both upload/download in the video conference, and then where the other end decreased their bandwidth by sending junky low res picture. I am much more polite and vain and had to keep sending in high resolution.