Monthly Archive for January, 2010

Configuring ASUS WL-520GU with Tomato

Published on January 27, 2010 in Network and Routers. Closed Tags: , , .

I recently bought an ASUS WL-520GU router from Newegg.com since I had serious problems with my NetGear WNR1000 router.  WNR1000 was dropping WLAN connections frequently and making my Blackberry reboot very often (for some strange reason). I couldn’t talk on my VoIP phone for more than a few minutes before it got disconnected.

ASUS WG54U has a built-in USB port to connect network strorage or printer and is DD-WRT ready. It cost me about $30 after a $10 rebate. I was originally planning to flash it with DD-WRT and did so. Later I found on some internet forums that Tomato has similar features plus more and a mod’ed version of Tomato called Teddy Bear supports USB drives and printers out of the box - all of this with a smaller memory foot print than DD-WRT.

Like DD-WRT, Tomato also is built on top of BusyBox embedded Linux. But unlike DD-WRT, Tomato configuration was not as smooth for me. Here are some of the lessons I learned in the process:

  • Before flashing with Tomato, I did not select the option to ‘Reset to Defaults’ on DD-WRT upgrade screen and did not note down the web admin password from nvram by issuing: 
    nvram get http_passwd

    After flashing I could not login to Tomato web admin page  since DD-WRT encrypts password stored in nvram but Tomato does not.  Had to reinstall DD-WRT and check the option ‘Reset to Defaults’ before re-flashing with Tomato.

  • Another problem was setting access restrictions (‘Access Restriction’ link on Tomato web admin page). I created a rule to block internet access from all computers on the home network from 9am to 7pm. Little did I realize that it will block all kinds of internet access – not just web access – and undermine my ability to access my home PC from outside. Had a tough time trying to figure out why Remote Desktop and ssh clients from my work PC are not able to access my home PC. So if you select ‘Block All Internet Access’ option while creating an Access Restriction rule all incoming and outgoing connections from your home network will be blocked.

  • Then there was another problem – but totally unrelated to Tomato – that prevented ssh connection to my router using Putty and public key authentication. Putty kept giving me ‘Server unexpectedly closed the connection’ error. It turned out that I had a badly formatted public key in my authorized_keys file in my <home>/.ssh directory on my home Linux server.  Removing the offending public_key made everything work like a charm.