New Router Firmware
I saw a post on Lifehacker about setting up a different firmware on my home router. I’ve tried this before with DD-WRT, HyperWRT and Open-WRT. The only version that I was able to get set up easily was HyperWRT. HyperWRT was alright (read functional) but it certainly wasn’t fantastic. In setting up the other two firmware I managed to brick two routers so I eventually gave in and left the stock firmware on my main gateway router.
Tomato
Last night I set up Tomato and I am very pleased with the results. I really like the eye candy that shows how you are using your bandwidth and I feel that this feature may prove to be useful in the future. I am also very interested to see how much bandwidth my house uses considering we have a few servers, two laptops, and a bunch of small devices that all connect to the internet. I will post some results at one month, three months, and hopefully a year.
Troubleshooting
The install went really smoothly. I uploaded the new firmware right over my old firmware (with fingers crossed) and I was running again in under a minute with no further configuration needed. The only issue I had was with configuring the bandwidth logs to save over the network to another box. I had to learn to configure Samba, which is the Linux version of Microsoft Windows shared folders. Normally, from within Linux, I connect via ssh to all my computers since it is secure (as opposed to Microsoft Windows shared folders). This is much easier to configure for me and I gave up bothering with Samba years ago. But to get this feature of Tomato working I needed a Samba share to push the logs to. I was able to configure everything and I was able to connect from my laptop to the share via smb://192.168.1.4/logs but I was unable to get the router to successfully connect. First, I was receiving the error:
"CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -6".
While tracing the connection attempt with wireshark I saw that the only difference was that my laptop was connecting successfully to smb://192.168.1.4/LOGS while the router was failing to connect to smb://192.168.1.4/logs. I changed the case so that the share name was uppercase and then I started receiving the error:
"CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -1".
I was able to resolve this by changing my samba configuration (/etc/samba/smb.conf) from “security = share” to “security = user”. After making this change and restarting samba everything worked fine.