www.polarcloud.com/tomato
I figured I’d give this firmware version a whirl on this WRT54GS I obtained, and from what I can tell, it rocks. It uses the linux kernel version 2.4.2 and takes up very little room in memory once loaded. In fact, I was able to turn off a ton of other services running in the background, which makes it boot and run faster it seems. After putting this firewall in place and getting Tomato running, I noticed a considerable difference in the flow of data across the net, like it’s processing frames and packets in a faster manner. As usual with hacked firmware for Linksys products, you can also increase the broadcast power level for the wireless side. Since I have an access point already though, I turned it off. The port-forwarding feature with Tomato is enhanced in a great way. With the standard Linksys firmware, both the internal and external ports must match. So if you want to forward external port 5900 to internal port 70, you cannot do that, which means you have to change internal port 70 to 5900, or change the external port 5900 to 70 so they match. But with Tomato, you can forward whatever external port you want, to any internal port. Very nice. Also, one really cool feature they added is the ability to check in and check out port-forwards. So I can create multiple port-forwarding rules for the same external port but have each rule forward to different ports internally, and then switch the rules in and out of place on the fly. Sweetness. Another really cool feature about this software is that once you are logged into the web interface, it has a section that displays a graph for the past five hours of incoming and outgoing traffic (displayed below). Also, the web interface looks totally different than the traditional Linksys colors and layout, which is a nice change. Anyway, check it out … and as usual when reporting on hacked firmware, I’m not responsible for what happens to you, your equipment, or any other negative things that transpire as a result of you installing this software. If you brick your equipment, well, I’m just sorry for you. If you get hacked because you increased the broadcast power level and did not properly secure your access point, it is your own fault. This hacked firmware is for the WRT54G/GS version 1-4 only! Keep that in mind and make sure you know what version you have, otherwise, you will brick it.