TomatoUSB

Whats going on? It has been over a year since the last post from teddy_b. I hope everything is alright.

Anyone have news?

Just check the forum in section "Tomato USB Modifications"
You will be surprised in a pleasant way.

Shibby, Teaman, jyavenard, et. al. are definitely doing a lot of great stuff.

I have to say it would be incredible to have Fedor join back into the mix. I was quite happy that he submitted a bunch of stuff in August, but he went away again unfortunately.

The thing with Fedor is that he does a lot of 'in-place' upgrades of existing functions which are really great for improving stability… e.g. backporting Kernel fixes, driver fixes, miniupnp fixes, etc etc.

The other folks are usually doing their great work around adding new features, which is also great, but in a different way… ;)

Fedor is still around, folks. But has other things to do these days. But I think he will still continue to post additions to .git when he has time. Anyway, we all wish him well and a great "Thank you" for what he has done so far to keep Tomato development going. Without him, it really would have stalled a few years ago.

Absolutely true. I don't think there would be any device support other than wrt54g still if not for him…
The k26 update was no small task!

It's great that development is continuing and kudos to all the contributors for tomato, I love it… however, I don't think it's sustainable to point users looking for a recent release to a forum section with over 150 threads and nearly 2000 posts. Is tomato really so stable and mature that there aren't any features or improvements worthy of an official release in over a year?

Is tomato really so stable and mature that there aren't any features or improvements worthy of an official release in over a year?

No, but TeddyB is the one in charge of official releases, and he's been away since real-world events happened in his life last year.

Frankly, I wish that someone would step up to be an unofficial standin for TB, but instead we have half-a-dozen people running around helter-skelter and slinging scads of half-baked and barely-tested features into myriads of "try this!" versions.

And as nifty as the RT-N16 and RT-33(?) routers are, a plain WL-520GU works just fine for 99.99% of the people needing a router, and they don't need customizable WEB pages, super-duper VPN, webcams, network storage, etc. For example, I have 3 routers, and my 520GU is the workhorse that is doing all my wireless access and routing. My RT-N16 I use for torrent downloading and playing music — and no routing.

Freeware developers, of course, are free to work on any features they want, and are attracted to working on fun and new "sexy" and "nifty" features. But most of these are not neccesssary or useful to most users. What most users want is a stable and rock-solid router, without fragile features that are prone to locking up or rebooting the router.

ray123
If you feel that way I suggest you to use stable stock fw.
I'm glad that some enthusiasm provide Best-test builds.
Your payback is to test and suggest implements.
Don't whining! If you don't like theirs build's don't use them and stop whining.

MR_Q

Hear, hear! Agreed!

I've used the stock builds, and they provide as much functionality (for the the hardware it pertains to) than any router firmware that I've seen (yes, just me) - and if there is any more functionality possible, it can be easily added w/ Optware.

TomatoUSB is the most efficient, highest quality wireless router firmware that I've used.

I think we're headed off in the wrong direction here. Yes, tomato is pretty awesome. Yes, the stock stable builds are wonderful and a huge upgrade from vendor firmware. No, the stable release isn't actually that old… yet.

I've been a tomato user for years (sorry, not a contributor, too many other projects) and only peaked into the forums to make sure things are still chugging along. This was actually sparked by visiting family over the holiday where I upgraded the tomato router I setup for them a couple years ago and was a little disappointed to see the date on the latest stable release. I looked here to see yes, there is still development, but there seem to be several forks of the code all meandering around and intertwined. I can't figure out if there's an active primary maintainer, so I get a little nervous and start looking to see if tomato is still the right choice. Fortunately (or not), it seems like the other prominent router projects have also stalled on releases.

I think it's appropriate that a project needs to do a little self evaluation once in a while to determine if it's going to continue to be viable and attract a critical mass of users and developers. I hate to do a drive by evaluation, but what I see here makes me a little nervous, especially when I factor in the role my tomato-based router plays in the security of my network.