Tomato by Shibby [RELEASE] 110 out now
- Thread starter GM4X4
- Start date
I'm back to 270.26b again. I find that the wireless is better on RMerlin firmware than I saw with tomato, especially on 5GHz. On 5GHz., tomato gave me 2 bars (out of 3) consistently in my living room on my iPad. 270.26b gives me 3 bars (out of 3 again) most of the time, and higher throughput consistently. This is with all my settings and router orientation exactly the same between the two. I'd say that speedtest.net showed as much as double the speed for RMerlin over tomato on 5GHz., while tomato never got close to the speed offered by RMerlin firmware, significant difference.
CTF ("hardware acceleration" on the Asus side firmware) also can be enabled on tomato, but I'm not sure how well it worked. I didn't try it since I don't have a fast enough connection at this point to test it, and the information that I saw about it in tomato on the internet was "inconclusive" to put it mildly *smile*.
I also like having the guest networks already set up, like they are for RMerlin firmware. There are instructions on the internet for making a guest network with separate SSID for tomato, but they are long and intricate.
Also noticed that the controls on RMerlin firmware are moving more towards tomato's, with added functionality in his firmware (like "Wireless Site Survey") and the ability to do an "oui" lookup, etc.
On the tomato side, the client list is very nice, with an easy way to convert from DHCP to static address for each client. Also, for wireless clients, the client list has the wireless properties (RSS, quality, connection speed) right there, so you don't have to go to another log to get them. Again, though, this is largely a limitation of the Asus graphic interface, although this could be gathered into the information that you get from mouse hovering on each client in the list.
Tomato also has strong monitoring tools for internet and bandwidth usage, as well as manipulating QOS and bandwidth limitation stuff. The ability to play with VLAN's in interesting ways is right in the interface for tomato, which is a strong point in it's favor. I'm sure that there are other tools that tomato provides that are not present on RMerlin's firmware, but I wouldn't have seen them since I wasn't looking for them.
So I guess my summary would be that while tomato offers controls and interface features not offered by RMerlin, unless you need those specific controls, I would stay with RMerlin firmware because of the faster wireless and easy guest network configuration. And as RMerlin continues to add features that tomato offers, enough for me now since I just use the router features *smile*, I suspect that things will tend to equalize out in that area as well.
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RMerlin
Asuswrt-Merlin dev
That option doesn't do anything on Tomato. Years ago they used to support CTF (an earlier version of it, far less efficient than the current implementation), but it was dropped since most of the Tomato features are incompatible with it anyway. They simply forgot to actually remove the option from the webui (although some Tomato variants might still have the ancient CTF version in the FW, but it will only work if you don't use IPTraffic, QoS, etc...)
I will never reach feature parity with Tomato, because by then there would no point in having Asuswrt-Merlin and Tomato. So, my goal is to reach a middle ground between Asuswrt (only basic features) and Tomato (a good amount of custom features). Fewer features makes the code easier to manage, and less likely to introduce new bugs or performance impact.
Basically, things go like this:
Features:
Asuswrt < Asuswrt-Merlin < Tomato < DD-WRT
Performance:
DD-WRT < Tomato < Asuswrt < Asuswrt-Merlin
Tho a lot of my performance optimizations eventually get integrated in the Asus firmware, like the Samba performance optimizations, so Asuswrt and Asuswrt-Merlin performance is often nearly identical.
There are quite a few features that I implement from Tomato because Asuswrt was originally forked form Tomato. My IPTraffic and OpenVPN implementations for example come straight from Tomato. However I have no plan at this time to integrated more advanced QoS or Bandwith Limiter. This is an area where I prefer to leave the "market" to Tomato, as it does a very good job at this already.
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in feature balancing rather than implementing as many features as possible, leading to stability issues, making it harder to maintain the code, or flat out confusing users with endless pages of options. I prefer to be VERY picky regarding what features I actually implement. I still leave the door open to a lot of additional customizations to be done by the users themselves. Asuswrt-Merlin is probably the router firmware with the most "hook points" for people to insert their own code, both due to the custom scripts I support and the config file customizations. I also tried to make it as easy as possible to use Entware, even including a setup script developped by ryzhov_al.
Thanks for clarifying what you're working towards. Since I don't need the detailed QoS functionality, etc., but do want the highest performance that I can get, your firmware does line up much better with my priorities than tomato does. So I'll be sticking with it as long as it continues to work as well as it does now *smile*. Hoping for wireless driver fixes, but I'm sure that they're coming...it'll be nice to be able to use the new features.
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hungarianhc
Regular Contributor
I'm having major stability issues w/ the 110 release of TomatoUSB by Shibby. I'm going to go down to 109, as people seem to have good reports w/ that build. If I want to move from 110 to 109, can I just do that in the router admin screen? Any funny stuff I need to do? Or should I do a 30-30-30 reset, etc? Thanks!
hungarianhc
Regular Contributor
I've had nothing but headaches w/ this router. This is my second one. I've downgraded to Shibby 109, i've reset the NVRAM, etc, and wireless performance is awful. Wired performance is good, but... I need wireless. My Amped Wireless R20000G comes tomorrow and hopefully that suffices!
If you need wireless performance, I'd suggest that you try RMerlin's version 270.26b firmware. It's performing quite well for me, much better than tomato did. Worth a try, unless you need some feature that's only in tomato for other reasons?
Oh yeah, my mother was born in Hungary, and came here with her parents when she was 4 years old *smile*. Small world.