My Linksys WRT54G (V1.1) wireless router has delivered faithful service for many years but for such a capable computing platform, it gets little attention from Cisco. The US firmware version is 4.21.1 (Jan07), while the official UK version is still at 4.20.8 (Oct05). The real issues are claims that 3rd-party firmware runs faster with more features and the original firmware is missing a couple of really nice to have functions, specifically:

• better noise floor and interference management tools
• comprehensive connected device lists to check for intruders.

Other goodies would be better remote management (e.g. SSH login), better logging and perhaps traffic measurements. One of the newer 3rd-party firmwares is Tomato and with some trepidation, a full config backup and local copies of the original Linksys firmware, I went ahead and installed v1.19.

It's a sad indictment on the state of software products that I was actually surprised it worked flawlessly. I wondered whether to do a Factory Reset before uploading but it's not necessary; Tomato read almost all of the Linksys config out of NVRAM; only the Port Forwarding table was not populated.

Right out of the box, I now have:
• Noise floor measurement (I'm at -86dBm)
• Realtime traffic graphs
• SSH and telnet login
• Integrated wired + wireless device list with RSSI
• AJAX-driven, interactive config screens

And much more is possible. I can see how one could become addicted to router flashing.