I try my best to lock down my home network as best I can. I’m not a security guru by any stretch of the imagination, but I know what I want from my router and if it’s not provided to me straight out of the box, then I have to find an inexpensive (read: free) way to fix it.

I’m one of the bajillions of people that own a Linksys WRT54G 4 port wireless router. I had found out that it is quite the popular model because it had its firmware released to satisfy the GPL. This means anyone can go in and manhandle the firmware and make changes to it to enhance it and tailor it to their liking.

One of the key features for me was the ability to modify QoS. I tend to have a lot of things going on in the background of my machine…Skype…P2P (legal stuff, thank you. ), so when I use it for basic web browsing, it gets pretty sluggish. QoS gives you the ability to set priority for data flows. Now, I can give my web traffic the highest priority while setting the P2P in the background.

Another feature I really liked about this firmware was its realtime bandwidth monitoring:

I’m able to view each machine and see how much bandwidth I’m using per machine / overall. A great feature if you share with a number of users or if your ISP caps your monthly bandwidth limit.

There are a ton of other features I love about this firmware, but you be the judge. The selling point for this one over the others that are made for this brand of router is the bandwidth monitoring. Others like DD-WRT don’t have that, but have other features that might suit your needs.

Have a look at Tomato here.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under Reviews, Stuff I'm using. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.