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The Grumpy Editor's Tomato reviewThe Grumpy Editor's Tomato reviewPosted Jan 11, 2010 22:40 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review
One question that comes to mind is: What "Open Source" friendly hardware routers are there?
The Linksys WRT54GL seems friendly at first, but then you have to deal with the Broadcom blob. Are atherios based hardware more hackable/long term supportable?
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The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review Posted Jan 11, 2010 23:37 UTC (Mon) by eli (guest, #11265) [Link]
Look into the WRT160NL. It's the successor to the WRT54GL. And that trailing 'L' is important: it's completely different hardware from the WRT160N.
The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review Posted Jan 11, 2010 23:50 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
Interesting. I am guessing work on making openwrt or dd-wrt is still ongoing. I see openwrt needs to physically hack the system to work (though that is an old wiki article)
The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review Posted Jan 12, 2010 2:09 UTC (Tue) by nbd (subscriber, #14393) [Link]
Current builds of OpenWrt (from SVN trunk or the git repo) generate images that can be flashed over the web interface on the WRT160NL. Serial seems to be necessary mainly for recovery at the moment, but I guess we'll find a way around that eventually.
The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review Posted Jan 12, 2010 5:32 UTC (Tue) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
I bought WRT160NL because the OpenWRT folks recommended it. So far I'm still running the
Linksys firmware that came with it. Seems to work fine.
The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review Posted Jan 12, 2010 8:06 UTC (Tue) by djc (subscriber, #56880) [Link]
It looks like the 160NL isn't in the supported hardware list on the OpenWRT site, though... Just the 160N. That seems to clash with what people here are saying?
Anyway, I have an aging WRT54GL I'd like to replace by something that also runs Linux, but I hadn't previously found anything else like it, so I'm happy enough to hear about the 160NL and will probably get it soon (I also run tomato at home).
At work, we just replaced our WRT54GL by something a little bit more enterprisey (a DrayTek with dual WAN configuration), but had to install dnsmasq separately on one of our servers (it was previously running as a part of tomato).
I really like the slickness and full-featuredness of tomato, I hope the author will update it sometime soon.
The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review Posted Jan 12, 2010 11:53 UTC (Tue) by nbd (subscriber, #14393) [Link]
The WRT160NL is not on the official supported hardware list yet, because it's not supported in the last official release (8.09.2) yet. It is supported in our development tree and will be supported in the upcoming release (scheduled for February).
The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review Posted Jan 21, 2010 14:53 UTC (Thu) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link]
Do you support ad-hoc mode on the 160NL? And what about multiple VAPs (master and ad-hoc at the same time)?
Any other hardware you can recommend for doing ad-hoc and master at the same time on a single radio? I've had little success with AR7.
Ubiquiti routers Posted Jan 12, 2010 1:19 UTC (Tue) by Per_Bothner (subscriber, #7375) [Link] Ubiquiti has various access points and routers, including the NanoStation 2 (which I have). They have Atheros hardware, and come with AirOS with offers "Open Source" Philosophy and Full SDK and Ubiquiti engineering support open for 3rd party firmware development. Not sure how much of AirOS is actually free software, but it can reportedly be reflashed with OpenWRT.
Ubiquiti routers Posted Jan 14, 2010 12:14 UTC (Thu) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]
Hear, hear, I have over 70 5 GHz NanoStations in operation and it really performs quite well.
Older AirOS versions (<5) were home-rolled Linux 2.4 distributions, where most things are OpenSource and delivered with the SDK, the exceptions being a few Atheros blobs and some userspace programs.
AirOS 5 is a customized OpenWRT, with Linux 2.6, with a specialized init and user interface.
The amount of binary blobs is limited in any case and Ubiquity hasn't gone out of their way to make it hard to customize the system.
The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review Posted Jan 12, 2010 1:39 UTC (Tue) by ras (subscriber, #33059) [Link]
My personal favourite is the Asus WL-500W. Lots of RAM and Flash (32Mb and 8Mb), and 2 x USB 2.0. And finally, cheaper than any LinkSys model.
http://oldwiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs(2f)Hardware(2f)Asus(2f)WL500W.html
The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review Posted Jan 12, 2010 2:10 UTC (Tue) by nbd (subscriber, #14393) [Link]
I'd recommend against buying new Broadcom while there's a variety of Hardware out there that is properly supported by entirely Free Software
The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review Posted Jan 12, 2010 6:43 UTC (Tue) by verbovet (subscriber, #46457) [Link]
Asus works perfectly with Oleg's free firmware http://oleg.wl500g.info
The Grumpy Editor's Tomato review Posted Jan 14, 2010 10:02 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
It works ok for me, but don't expect good performance from a usb hd attached. It's really bad, even
on wired. The standard firmware might be better, but i haven't really tried.
Also i still don't have 802.11n with openwrt (stable).
WRT-Alternatives Posted Jan 12, 2010 9:58 UTC (Tue) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032) [Link] I'm very happy with my Fonera2.0: Atheros Chipset+USB2.0 It runs quite well with OpenWRT although there are occasional issues because it still relies on the madwifi driver. They even have a model with 801.22N WiFi but I don't have any experience with that particular model. Their official Firmware is OpenWRT based and they employ some of the OpenWRT hackers, so it can be expected that the hardware will be well supported, even in the future.
WRT-Alternatives Posted Jan 21, 2010 14:55 UTC (Thu) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link]
I don't think the N model is supported by any free software.
The non-N Fonera models (original, + and 2) use the Madwifi drivers, which include a binary blob.
Look at Ubiquiti RouterStation Pro Posted Jan 14, 2010 11:59 UTC (Thu) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]
RouterStation from Ubiquiti is born with OpenWRT and other than being extraordinarily beefy it has room for 3 miniPCI radios:
http://www.ubnt.com/products/rspro.php
I can't recommend Ubiquiti products enough, somehow they manage to do cheap, flexible and high-quality at the same time.
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