for
routers seems to be good software. It's a simple replacement firmware
for the
and a few other
Broadcom based routers. It's tightly focussed on being a good router,
nothing more. And it has
.
The main feature it has over most routers is Quality of
Service routing. The default configuration once you turn it on
gives priority to DNS requests, small Web requests, and outbound ACKs.
That last feature is really important; it should solve problem
that a single upload totally kills all downloads on an asynchronous
connection like residential DSL. I also tweaked it to give ssh and ntp priority.
The other main Tomato feature is fancy bandwidth
graphing. Overkill for me, but cool. And the firmware has lots of
knobs to turn; I like being
able to tweak the NAT
connection tracking.
Tomato isn't going to solve my problem of flaky router hardware, but
at least the software may work sensibly. The QoS feature should be a
significant improvement. Hopefully some day a consumer router manufacturer
will get smart and build QoS in to their products.
