Installing a Tomato Router

This post is off the topic of Ubuntu and on the topic of networking that supports my Ubuntu systems, but I figure that's fair game (hey, it's my blog).

I have gotten really frustrated with the reliability of my existing wireless access points (a Airport express and a Linksys WAP54G). Both would fail regularly, requiring a power cycle to make them functional again.

So, as a big open source advocate, I thought I'd give Tomato a try. I followed these directions at Lifehacker. For a router I ordered a Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL (chosen from the list of Tomato-supported devices).

At this point, let me jump ahead here and give you a heads up. I was not able to use Firefox from my Ubuntu box to upgrade the firmware (or do much of anything) on the WRT54GL. Anytime I tried to apply a change on any of its web pages, I got a "Connection Interrupted" error. I turned to google and found other people who had encountered this problem. Like them I had to use Konqueror to do the firmware installation. Konqueror was installed on my Ubuntu system easily enough:

# apt-get install konqueror

The other thing to do before you start is make sure you know all the configuration details of your current router as you might need them to configure the new router. In my case, my ISP (Comcast) required the WAN port have a specific MAC address. I suggest you just print the administration screens for reference.

I downloaded the latest version of the Tomato Firmware (Version 1_23.7). I followed these directions to install 7Zip to unpack this archive (it looks like there is now also a .zip version if you want to skip this step):

# apt-get install p7zip-full

And then I unpacked the archive:

% 7z e Tomato_1_23.7z
7-Zip 4.58 beta Copyright (c) 1999-2008 Igor Pavlov 2008-05-05
p7zip Version 4.58 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,1 CPU)

Processing archive: Tomato_1_23.7z

Extracting whr_install.bat
Extracting WR850G.bin
Extracting WRT54GS.bin
Extracting WRT54GSv4.bin
Extracting WRT54G_WRT54GL.bin
Extracting WRTSL54GS.bin
Extracting readme.htm
Extracting tomato.trx

Everything is Ok

Files: 8
Size: 16854823
Compressed: 2844464

Now I was ready to upgrade the router to the Tomato firmware. Before I started I plugged my laptop into wired network and disabled wireless (right-click on network applet and de-selected "Enable wireless").

Then I disconnected my old NAT router and put the WRT54GL in it's place. Your network will go away at this point but you should still be able to connect to the router by entering http://192.168.1.1 into your browser.

Even though my router was fresh out of the box, I went ahead and reset it to make sure. I fired up Konqueror (Firefox won't work for this...) and connected to the router at http://192.168.1.1 (by default the username is blank and the password is "admin").

Then under "Administration"/"Factory Default" I selected "Yes" and "Apply" to reset all the settings. Then I did a hard reset by holding the reset button on the back of the router for 30 seconds.

Ok, now I was ready to upgrade. I connected back to the router and selected "Administration"/"Firmware Update". I selected the file "WRT54G_WRT54GL.bin" from the upacked Tomato archive (see readme.htm from the Tomato archive if you have a different router) and started the upgrade. It took about two minutes to complete.

Now I logged into my brand new Tomato router. I pointed my web browser (you can change back to Firefox now) at http://192.168.1.1 and logged in using the username "admin" and password "admin" and I was in.

First things I did were the following:

• Under "Administration" I set a new password (and I do strongly suggest you do this first).
• I wasn't getting an IP address on the WAN side. I had to set my WAN MAC address to what my old router had been. I did that under "Advanced"/"MAC Address" by setting the value of "WAN Port". After applying that, I now had Internet connectivity on my wired connection.
• Now, under "Basic"/"Network" I set the wireless SSID and Security (WPA2 Personal and shared key, aka password). After that was applied I disconnected my laptop's wired connection and was able to connect to the Internet through my wireless. Success!

The only other thing I did was under "Basic"/"Network" I set the Static DNS servers to those of OpenDNS.

I'll report back after a while on how the new router is doing.