Tomato Wifi!
While doing that podcast with Daniel, I noticed I was seeing 30% or so packet loss on my wifi network. After rebooting some equipment and keeping an eye on things, I decided to scrap my faulty Airport Express base stations and replace them with Linksys WRT54GLs running a custom opensource firmware called Tomato.
While the instructions are good, they assume you already have the router up and running. The first thing I realized was to throw the windows install cd away and just plug my mac into the switch on the back. The router will be listening on 192.168.1.1:80 with a username and password of admin/admin. The instructions will carry you from that point.
I have a 3 story house so I bought two routers and bridged them together with WDS. My only complaint is that Tomato's WDS is difficult to setup. The Airport Express admin utility did a wonderful job of easily bridging the two aiport express base stations together.
Except for one of the routers dying after only a few days, which Amazon was nice enough to replace for free with next-day shipping, things have been great on Tomato. 4 bars everywhere I go in the house.
[Hat tip to Nelson for the recommendation.]
posted by Steve Jenson at 4:57 PM
![[Atom Enabled]](http://saladwithsteve.com/valid-atom.png)
5 Comments:
How do you measure packet loss on an Airport network?
4:56 PM
I compared ping on Airport vs. ping when plugged into a switch. 0% packet loss from the switch.
Hey, I just noticed a new feature: Email follow-up comments. Great!
5:31 PM
I'd like to try this, but I have a few questions:
1) how did you know that amazon would send you hardware version that was compatible with tomato? It seems that only old routers are supported.
2) what does this mean from the instructions? "As long as you configure your notebook not to stick to a single MAC address, it should switch automatically to the strongest signal as you move around." Is there a setting in OSX for this?
3) in order to chain 3 of them (#1 --- #2 --- #3), how can this be done if there is only 1 MAC address field - router #2 would seem to need 2 MAC address fields, one for #1, and another for #3
I realize that you may not have the answers, but I thought I'd try.
Thanks in advance
2:17 PM
Hi Jeff,
I'm afraid I don't have the answers to your questions. I didn't have any trouble getting tomato installed on the 3 new routers amazon sent me. (One of the routers died and had to be replaced which is why I'm listing 3).
As for the other two questions, Google is probably your best bet. I haven't had any trouble roaming my house with WDS on OS X. Both Leopard and Tiger.
I think you'll want to find a tomato mailing list. Good luck!
3:38 PM
how did you know that amazon would send you hardware version that was compatible with tomato? It seems that only old routers are supported.
Linksys sells the WRT54GL (note the "L") which is a Linux-based router. That's the one you want. They're selling it expressly for us hobbyists who want to play with the firmware.
7:19 PM
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home