Shibby Tomato

[snowzach]

I've been a long time Shibby Tomato user on my Asus RT-N16 which worked awesome. I've upgraded to a RT-AC66U and continue to use Tomato however the power and throughput just don't seem nearly as good.

I bought another thinking it's just that the hardware isn't quite as good. I got another RT-AC66 and loaded the ASUS-Merline firmware on that one to go side by side and compare. It's crazy how much better the throughput is on Merlin vs loading tomato. I went back and forth on the same device same place with my laptop and it was pretty consistent. Tomato, the best I could get was 100Mbps and with Merlin I had way better signal it seemed and got 300Mbps most of the time. I even tested sitting right next to the router so it certainly wasn't a signal issue.

Anyone else have this? Shibby, if you're out there, any chance you'll upgrade your RT/AC branch to use the latest drives and utilities? I love your mod of Tomato.

 

[Engineer]

Have you tried setting the power level to 0 (zero) on both your 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands? This sets power to 'hardware default' and 'seems' to have helped people get better coverage. YMMV.

 

[enr00ted]

Tomato tradeoffs

Sorry to half-hijack your thread, but what are the other trade-offs of going from Merlin to Tomato. Can't seem to find a serious comparison and detailed information.

 

[snowzach]

Honestly, you don't gain a lot... I actually just updated to the latest Merlin...

So Tomato:
I like the web interface a lot better.

Traffic monitoring by host is better
QoS settings have more control (can be better or worse if you don't know what you're doing)
I think you can get dynamic routing protocols like RIP.
The Dynamic DNS for zoneedit doesn't seem to work on Merlin. (I've yet to ask about it yet though, that could be a zoneedit problem)

It's not worth it though to have worse throughput so I'm on Merlin for now. I'll be back if the issues get fixed.

 

[Engineer]

Just a note that Shibby posted that version 125 would be released shortly. He posted a list of update but nothing about wireless strength or drivers. Just a FYI.

 

[enr00ted]

So they are using different driver version ?

 

[snowzach]

Yah, they are using different driver versions but as it turns out, it may not matter.

I went through and set my country to Austrailia as mentioned in a few other posts on linksysinfo and that seemed to fix my problems.

I was able to get a proper 40 or 80mhz link and then was able to run about 300mbps which is what I was getting with merlin. Back to shibby tomato for me. Happy camper.