[TheIndividual]

Hey all,
as some of you may know I've been around this scene for a while. On my main router I have been using Tomato for a while now and only recently switched back to DD-WRT due to new hardware.

I was very surprised that on the surface, not much had changed in about 1 year. Plenty of new devices are supported and that's great. However compared to the slick Tomato GUI the web interface of DD-WRT lacks some really nice features. Note that I do not want to advertise Tomato or diss DD-WRT, my only interest is to make this great firmware even better.

Here's a list of things that - IMHO - are solved in a better way on Tomato. The list is meant as an inspiration for potential contributors or porter (Tomato is open source as well).

1) Sortable tables. In tomato it is possible to sort each table by clicking on the column label. Let's take the active client list for example. Adding global sortable tables would allow you to sort this list by IP, MAC or number of connections. Especially for big installation this would be a huge benefit. You would also be able to quickly sort port mappings and every other table in the firmware

2) Allow removal from the mittle of a list. Say you want to remove a port forward that isn't on the bottom of the list. Right now you'd have to overwrite it with the last list item and then remove the last one. It gets worse if you want to change multiple lines. This is solved much better in tomato where you can just tick the element(s) you want to delete and be done with it.

3) Confusing Add/Remove behaviour: when entres in DD-WRT tables I sometimes face this situation:
there is one empty row I fill out and a Add/Remove button below. Will clicking "Add" just add a new row, deleting my entry or will it add the stuff I just entered? I don't know for sure but I believe the behaviour is inconsitent across different DD-WRT admin pages.

4) QOS Verification/Connection tracking: right now we can only set the QOS and have no way to verify that the traffic we're trying to manipulate is actually classified correctly. Tomato has a very nice GUI for following which connections are mapped into which class. This is even more important since L7 matching is not always reliable, for example if bittorrent traffic is encrypted. Also it can help you figure out which machine is heavily using the upstream over which ports (important if you're not in control of all clients, public Wifi comes to mind).

5) More flexiable QOS rules (not GUI)
In Tomato you more options when configuring QOS. For example you can put traffic into a different class if X bytes have been transfered (http downloads, DNS tunneling). You can also define that all traffic from (or to) port X of machine Y will be in a certain class. IIRC it is also much easier to create rules for known machines (MAC adresses) without entering a MAC the router already knows.

6) Partial settings backup/recovery (Tomato does not have this)
It seems unneccesary that one has to re-enter all settings after a firmware update. At least it is recommended. After all, most NVRAM entries should remain static over many development iterations. How about defining a human readable format that doesn't store the actual NVRAM but an abstract subset of those. I'm thinking static DHCP entries, port mappings, PPPoE username/password, DDNS. Its not like these get changed in every SVN build

What do others think of those ideas? Is there interest? As far as I can tell the development focus right now is more on making new devices work then on making things easier for home users. This is not a bad thing but I was just curious if that assumption is correct. Or are there other factors preventing major GUI changes (device compatiblity, testing)?

Do we know what's planned for v25? Is there a lack of contributors due to the license discussions?

May I also suggest a forum for general (firmware) discussion regardless of the platform? It seems that a lot of general discussion like my thread here is happening in the broadcom forum even though it affects all platforms.

Looking forward for the commmunity feedback.
Regards, TheIndividual

[crashfly]

On your item 6, that is already possible. Another user (frater) created a script that is able to be run and creates backups for in memory variables. I have used it (slightly modified version) and it works beautifully.

The link is here (also listed in the "Peacock" thread):
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=44324

[compuguy1088]

[Sash]

i make this sitcky for now..there are some points which we should talk about for v.25 later on.

[barryware]

I ran Tomato for just a bit but then found dd-wrt so I can not make comparisons. I'm used to the dd-wrt gui and I find everything I need but I also run relatively simple configurations.

I would like to see the ability to flash without disturbing the configurations or possibly a menu, gui driven backup / restore that would work across builds. I realize that "backwards compatibility" may be an issue to restore a config from a 12999 build to a 10001 build but going forward should not be an issue.

[frater]

I'm trying to get a reverse-proxy in DD-WRT, but I didn't get further than getting the binary "pound" included.

The reverse proxy is working great for almost a year now, but it still does it with self-written scripts.

An integration in the webinterface would make it accessible for all users and they would then see the beauty of being able to access all their different http-servers on their LAN (satellite-receiver, apache, NAS) from the Internet using a subdomain instead of different ports.
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=37958

[ThETImo]

In my opinion there's lots of good in DD-WRT, although everything can surely be improved. I've also used Tomato for a while, actually that was what I first tftp'd my Buffalo with.

What keeps on confusing me in DD-WRT is the 'save' and 'apply' buttons. Could someone add to the wiki, for example, the situations where plain save/apply is valid without the other. Or is it necessary to click both every time? To my sense, only 'apply' would be enough to make changes made valid.

[ad5mb]

I would like the ability to sort the wireless survey list by multiple criteria.

Open APs on top, sorted by RSSI, for example.

[MKruer]

I agree with a lot that has been said. I would like to add that in addition to just GUI fixes, allowing for more customizable installation of various service would both help keep the installation minimal and in the process hopefully simplifying the code making it more bug resilient. I am running a Linksys WRT54GSV4 and right now I am not running half the "optional" settings which qualifies me the micro, and yet I need the stranded version because it the smallest on the has kaid.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/What_is_DD-WRT%3F#File_Versions

Right now there are seven versions.
Micro, Mini, Nokaid, Standard, VOIP, VPN*, Mega**

I think that it should be more like Micro + any add-ons. I hope overtime dd-wrt will mature into a more modular approach to the various service it offers, but in the mean time the points listed above are in my opinion the right directing to follow

[robertut]

I also used Tomato for quite a long time on my Asus WL-500GP, too bad it lacks USB support. I used it because more than a year ago it seemed a much better alternative for the regular home user than DD-WRT. Back then DD-WRT didn't support USB and many other functions either.

To be honest, I was very pleased with Tomato's QOS features, and data vizualization methods. We used it intensively in a media-corporate environment during the Olympics - it ran rock stable in all aspects.

I had to quit on it because I needed Asterisk on the router, and the easiest way was to run DD-WRT with Optware, all on a USB stick.

[Exvitermini]

i agree. I would also like to have the ability to delete items from the middle of a list.
There is a trick you can apply to delete something at the middle of a list rite now. i discovered this by accident lol
all u gotta do is:
- set application name to blank
- set port from and port to to 1
- set IP Address to blank
- uncheck Enable

now hit Apply and this field will go to the bottom.
now u can hit remove and it will delete the blank one at the bottom. it is till deleting from bottom but u dont have to shuffle rules around this way.
look at attached images

the other thing i would like to see is better control over QoS as well.

[redhawk0]

FYI....

Item #1.....Eko added sort to the tables starting with the 12121 build release 05/15/09.

redhawk

[krick]

I just recently switched from a D-Link DI-624 to a Linksys WRT54GL running DD-WRT.

The first thing I noticed when I went to move all my settings over from the D-Link was that the DD-WRT GUI for setting up static IP addresses is really awful compared to the D-Link.

Here's a link to their emulator that shows the screen....
http://support.dlink.com/emulators/DI624/h_dhcp.html

It's kind of hard to get the full picture without some data present, so I'll try to get a screenshot of my router settings and update this post later.

Their GUI isn't perfect by any means, but it does allow you to do one thing really easy... assign static IP addresses with a few clicks.

Here's the sequence (more or less)...

1) connect with a client and get a dynamic IP
2) log into the router and look at the DHCP tab
3) select the mac address you want in the DHCP Client drop-down box
4) hit the "clone" button to populate the fields
5) change the last octet if desired (i.e. to something under 100)
6) hit apply

It sure as hell beats figuring out and typing in mac addresses manually.

[SaruKi]

I recently tried Tomato. I came back to DD-WRT. I set one MAC address to Bulk in DD-WRT's QoS, and that computer is correctly handled and doesn't affect the other computers much. No problems with pings or downloads on other computers.

I tried doing the same thing with Tomato. It was unable to classify some of that same computer's traffic. It is a BitTorrent downloader, the other computers had sky high pings and sluggish speeds unlike w/ DD-WRT.

I agree with the rest. Like when in port forwarding, you should be able to select which rule you want to remove.

[crashfly]