Tomatoes and Routers

No, this isn't a candidate name for a new blog.
Over the past several months, during which my blog has been deafeningly silent, I've been writing RESTful web services based on Jersey and Spring 3 organized as a Maven project of around 20 modules. The entire project has an almost fully-automated build and release cycle with Hudson and Sonar running nightly code analyses. Our test coverage is about 87%, and we're aggressively pushing it higher. Cyclomatic complexity per method is 1.6. There are a ton of things I could blog about, but I just haven't taken the time to think through the distinct topics I should write about. This post is not about that.

This post is about my new Linksys WRT54GL. While I may be the last person on earth to get one of these (>3k customer reviews on Newegg? seriously??), I'm still going to give a brief synopsis, because it's just really cool. Yes, it's an old model--a dinosar in computer years. Yes, it only supports 802.11g. But respectively: there's a reason it's both the most- and highest-rated of all wireless routers on Newegg, and do you *really* need 802.11n? If you need the most speed possible out of your wireless network, then give this a pass and go with a wireless n product. If, like me, you never find yourself wishing for faster wireless--and you're at least 23% geek--not to say I'm limited to 23%--and not to say I'm not (how many points do I get for reading a Lisp book in my spare time?)--then this could be the perfect router for you.
Initial setup was a snap. The first thing out of the box was a paper with size 72 font that said "Put the CD in first". That was pretty much all the instructions, and the CD takes you step by step through everything in simple, well-presented steps accompanied by pretty pictures. With just that, you've got a number of powerful options for setting up your network, though maybe nothing you wouldn't find in competing products. What really gives this router its strength is the fact that it's a deliberately open platform:

"The Linux-based Wireless-G Linux Broadband Router was created specially for hobbyists and wireless aficionados." --http://homesupport.cisco.com/en-us/wireless/lbc/WRT54GL

There are numerous third-party firmwares available for it. From a fairly small amount of research, it seems that you can turn this router into virtually anything, as long as it fits in the available memory:

• FTP server via ProFTPD
• Windows file sharing client and/or server via Samba
• Welcome/login page and access restrictions for network access for use in a public setting via Chillispot

And that's only a small sample of the stuff you can run on it using just the DD-WRT firmware.
That being said, I passed on DD-WRT and went with Tomato. It doesn't have all the capabilities, but the installation instructions for Tomato are very short and sweet. DD-WRT seems a bit more involved. Even so, with Tomato, you get static DHCP reservations (strangely missing from the stock firmware), internal DNS and DNS caching for your network (DHCP and DNS provided by Dnsmasq), SSH/telnet access to the router's OS--Linux, btw--Samba client for making storage available to the router, great visibility into your network usage via live graphs and historical metrics reporting, and a slick AJAX web UI.
All of that, and installing Tomato really was as simple as downloading it and using the router's standard "update firmware" screen to install it! If you don't already have a WRT54GL, buy one. Or maybe two. If you do have one but haven't switched to a third-party firmware, do it now! You won't regret it! Unless your power goes out in the middle of flashing!