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I'm thankful Jeff Atwood posted another article about the commodity router + open source firmware one-two punch [1]. I finally took the plunge and installed Tomato (Toastman [2]) and have been thrilled with the features, but mostly excited about the fact I get to tinker with another device :) It is empowering to know that I can circumvent overarching and onerous policies such as this...innovation...by Cisco.

[1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-st...

[2]: http://toastmanfirmware.yolasite.com/

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Don't miss the previous discussion of Jeff's post here on Hacker News for more details and alternatives:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4127393

I did indeed follow both the discussion here and the comments on his post closely! I wasted/spent a good 6+ hours reading about all kinds of router features that I had didn't know existed, or never even thought possible (VLANs, VPN, NFS, CIFS, Captive Portal, router CPU overclocking, etc). Some versions of Tomato (Shibby's firmware [1] in particular) allow the router to act as a BitTorrent client! I'm sure it's old news to some, but for anyone on the fence about trying new firmware on their routers - take the plunge.

[1]: http://tomato.groov.pl/

I have an ASUS RT-N16 router at home, which I connected to a hard-drive by USB. Then with Tomato installed, you can SSH into the router and install optware. Then you can configure optware[1] to install its packages on the external hard-drive. From there, you can retrieve and install a bunch of packages, like http servers, bittorrent clients and whatever else you feel like running from the CLI. Pretty convenient! I installed Transmission with a web-gui and I can SSH into it from anywhere in the world to my house's router, load a magnet or torrent in the queue and when I get home, the content will be waiting for me on my hard-drive.

I don't pretend Tomato firmware are the first to allow to do so, but I just found it was an interesting and usefull thing.

[1] http://tomatousb.org/tut:optware-installation

The N16 is a good piece of hardware. I've been running one with DD-WRT for a while.

Same here. The N16 with DD-WRT is an awesome setup. However, I just moved and got FiOS and have a ticket in to avoid using their crappy router/modem you are forced to use.

Also, if you are in the market for an upgrade, my friend showed me the new Asus RT-N66u. I likey n16 but the new one has a faster CPU and more RAM.

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