Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Sudden Tomato Fanboidom.

I ordered up a new Linksys wrt54gl router and installed Tomato on it for my firmware and I have to say, that's a lot of really useful features. I mean any feature I've every really kind of wanted and a still producing community that seems ready and able to produce more stuff. I'm currently maxing out my connection with both connections and throughput and it doesn't seem to be slowing down my web browsing at all. The QoS thusly is probably working, or one of the many other features that tries to do such things. All in all, I'm pretty happy. Sure, I don't really need a router that has a graphical ajax interface to display my current bandwidth utilization... but knowing that there is such a router that does such a thing makes you totally want one right?

I'll see how it works over the longer term but it seems pretty damn nice. Some of it could be that my previous Netgear FVS318v3 was kind of a piece of crap. It needed daily reboots, if you used too many connections it would lockup and need a more frequent reboot, it limited my 15 mbit/s download speed to a solid max of 8mbit/s (without router 12-15, with 6-8) (turns out the packet inspection for the firewall made it go really slow). I could deal with the connections just don't use more than a ~400 connections at the same time, or turn the timeout up. The timeout being turned up caused youtube to fail, and everything else to kind of suck. I thought Netgear was kind of douchey when somebody pointed out the connection problem on their forums and was redirected to a much more expensive router... as if doing a good amount of connections isn't something that home users should every actually do. Pfft.

Also, the house really needed some wireless access.

Community supported linux firmware on a router!!!! SPRING BREAK!!! WOOOOO!!!

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