TomatoUSB

I am running Tomato Firmware 1.28.0000 MIPSR2-102 K26 USB AIO-64K on Asus RT-N66U. I had used Tomato firmware in the past on an older Asus router too. While it is a great firmware, it was always complicated to know how so many different settings respond to changes.

I had an Engenius router before but bought an Asus RT-N66U in order to be able to run Tomato on it. The main reason for running Tomato is to be able to watch download/upload per IP address. I am happy that Tomato does provide bandwidth monitoring per IP address but there are issues and problems:

1- The router does not promptly update the list of connected devices. For example, if a laptop or smart phone was on the network one month ago, it is still on the device list and I don't find any way to update the list to remove old devices from the list.

Even worse: when a device connects to the router and the router assigns an IP address to the device, it sticks to the device so that if I assign a different IP address to the same device, it does not switch to the new IP address right away. What happens is that the device now shows in the device list twice with two different IP addresses, one assigned by the router and one assigned by me through the static DHCP. Both IP addresses also show up the bandwidth monitor per IP.

2- It seems sometimes the router slows down and it takes me some time before a web page opens. I didn't have such a problem with the Engenius router or with the Asus with the stock firmware.

3- When a device on the network starts downloading a large file, the general web browsing sometimes slows down. The Engenius router didn't have this problem and the stock Asus firmware wasn't as bad either.

Regards.

#1 — Is a problem when one wants all known clients to have fixed LAN IP addresses, and uses DHCP to find the MAC addresses of new devices so that they can then be given a "static" LAN IP address. (Until which time new devices remain in "crawl" mode.)

On additional problem with this is that there seems to be no easy way to "disconnect" one wireless client.
A further problem is that the Tomato pages give no prior warning of exactly which services will be restarted.

So, it appears necessary, sometimes, to reboot the entire router, just to get a single client switched over from their temporary DHCP LAN IP address to their permeant LAN IP address.

Furthermore, something (?) maintains a list of obsoleted LAN IP addresses (for IP traffic) in some manner that persists across reboots, but not in an obvious, manageable place.

So, the IP Traffic Pie charts, for example, are cluttered with disused IP addresses.

Perhaps someone here knows how to remove them from the router's "memory"?

As for #2 and #3, if these could be stated with more precision, so that they could be replicated, it might be helpful.

Tomato v1.28.0000 MIPSR2-104 K26 USB AIO-64K

I tried rebooting and it does seemingly get rid of old unused IP addresses that are not in the static DHCP list.

Rebooting however erases the history of bandwidth usage. So I would need to switch the storage option from RAM to another device in order to keep the record across rebooting. I am wondering which option does the job? I see there are NVRAM, JFFS2, CIFS1, CIFS2 and custom path. I don't know the differences. Can one use the custom path to save the history of bandwidth usage on a PC attached to the router?

As per questions 2 and 3, I will keep an eye next time, they happen and try to be more specific. One problem with QoS is learning to interface and various options to effectively use it, is not an easy task since I can't find a thorough tutorial around.

Thanks.