Using Tomato firmware

yoshytoshy

Hi ,just wondering if someone can clarify what the TX and RX are on the firmware?

Is the TX the output of the router to my machines ,or is it the data packets sent out from my machines ?

watty

I don't know why people use this, DD-WRt and Open-WRT are better
I find OpenWRT best supported.
www.openwrt.org

yoshytoshy

I'll give it a go ,thanks .
I flashed with tomato because I thought it was the best one ,recommended by someone on the forum here:(

Laters.

Some_Person

Tx is transmit rate and Rx is receive rate which is the link speeds.

GreyAlien

watty wrote: »

I don't know why people use this, DD-WRt and Open-WRT are better
I find OpenWRT best supported.
www.openwrt.org

I actually find Tomato far superior to DD-WRT for my needs. Tomato has far better QoS then DD-WRT and better bandwidth monitoring graphs/logs.

DD-WRT has some extra features, ones which the majority of users will never use and thus bloat it further. I would only use DD-WRT over Tomato when the router doesn't support Tomato.

Can't comment much on OpenWRT as i have yet to try it. I've heard good things about it, just that it's more difficult to setup and the user needs to be more knowledgeable of linux commands.

yoshytoshy

thanks for the replies ,if the other software is more advanced I won't bother with it.
I like the way tomato works and I'm using an internet radio 100FT+ away from the router ,the radio is saying it has 65-75% signal strenght.

vibe666

GreyAlien wrote: »

I actually find Tomato far superior to DD-WRT for my needs. Tomato has far better QoS then DD-WRT and better bandwidth monitoring graphs/logs.

ditto.

I went from Thibor15c to dd-wrt (several versions) and just recently moved to Tomato (v1.23) because of several recurring poblems with dd-wrt and find Tomato to be superior in almost every way and it is most certainly more stable than any of the versions of dd-wrt that I've tried.

check out the tomato forum on linksysinfo compared to dd-wrt and you'll see what I mean.

aside from people saying how great it is and how they'd never go back to their previous firmware (mostly dd-wrt btw), adding mods to the firmware to add features and wanting the odd bit of info, it's almost completely devoid of actual issues. tomato users are actually a pretty smug bunch as it goes.

as for TX and RX, it depends on what tab you're on (assuming you're on the bandwidth monitoring page).

on the WAN tab, it's RX is what's coming in over your internet connection and TX is everything going out.

the WL tab is data to/from wifi devices on your LAN, so if you're copying data from a wired device on your LAN to a wireless device, all the activity will show up here depending on which way you're copying.

depending on exactly how you're set up there may be some other tabs for different vlans etc.

watty

Some linux knowledge is needed for OpenWRT, but it's documented on the wiki and forums.
I wasn't impressed with DD-wrt and found Tomato couldn't support what I wanted and OpenWRT did.

It depends on what you need. One OpenWRT user added SDcard, audio and LCD to Linksys WRT54 router Not a WiFi Radio for the beginner.

I guess OpenWRT is more flexible and Tomato more consumer friendly.

yoshytoshy

Am I to take from the posts that if I changed the firmware ,I might not get the same range from the router ?

watty

not directly . The range depends on the effective TX power of the client device and the Router hardware. x10 more router power doest not increase range as limit is usally the laptop/phone/wiFi-radio.
The same WiFi settings on ANY version of firmware give the same power for given hardware.

Marlow

No. That only changes if you fiddle with the power on the wireless.

Depending on what firmware you use, the amount of functions it has change, not the range.

/Martin

yoshytoshy

I'll stick with what I have so ,thanks.

vibe666

you might not, but it's easy enough to back up your config in whatever firmware you are currently using and keep trying different ones to see which one ssuits you best.

I actually still have a WRT with dd-wrt on it simply because it was a wrt54gs v5 (someone gave it to me for free) and dd-wrt micro was the only 3rd party firmware i could get onto it and it's actually okay for the most part, UT pretty much all the decent extra features of dd-wrt had to be removed for it to fit on the tiny amount of memory they put into the v5 gs's.

oh, and there's modded versions of tomato with USB ports andmemory card slots added as well.

don't think there's anything as fancy as an LCD, but you'd have to question how much use it would be. sounds like it's been done more 'because it can be' than because it could be useful.

i already have bandwidth and system logging enabled and backing up to a share on my LAN and the UI gives me everything else I need.

i always planned on using OpenWRT bt I decided to give Tomato a go first and I honestly can't see me needing anything else, so I'm sticking with it for now.

watty

The x2 line LCD is Text interface to built in Internet radio

vibe666

ah yeah, I've seen hat on the la fonera router that the fon project use. now there's a handy bit of kit.

actually, now I think about it, that's another router I still have dd-wrt on!

they should rename it triffid-wrt, that stuff get's on everything!

have to say though, for what it is, the fonera is a stunning little yoke and is currently very sucessfully making one of my xbox media centres wireless.