Tomato is a family of community-developed,

custom firmware Custom firmware, also known as aftermarket firmware, is an unofficial new or modified version of firmware created by third parties on devices such as video game consoles and various embedded device types to provide new features or to unlock hidden ...

for consumer-grade

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

ing routers and gateways powered by

Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

chipset In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components An electronic component is any basic discrete device or physical entity in an electronic system used to affect electrons or their associated fields. Electronic components are ...

s. The firmware has been continually forked and modded by multiple individuals and organizations, with the most up-to-date fork provided by the FreshTomato project.

History

Tomato was originally released by Jonathan Zarate in 2006, using the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

kernel and drawing extensively on the code of

HyperWRT HyperWRT is a GPL firmware project for the Linksys WRT54G and WRT54GS wireless routers based on the stock Linksys firmware. The original goal of the HyperWRT project was to add a set of features—such as power boost—to the latest Linux-base ...

. It was targeted at many popular routers of the time, most notably the older

Linksys WRT54G series The Linksys WRT54G Wi-Fi series is a series of Wi-Fi–capable residential gateways marketed by Linksys, a subsidiary of Cisco from 2003 until acquired by Belkin in 2013. A ''residential gateway'' connects a local area network (such as a home netwo ...

Buffalo AirStation Buffalo AirStation is the name given to a series of wireless LAN equipment sold by Buffalo Technology. Products * Residential gateways * Wireless LAN cards Use with third party firmware Many of Buffalo's residential gateways use Broadcom ...

Asus routers ASUSTeK Computer Incorporated (Asus) manufactures a series of network routers directly competing with Linksys routers from Belkin. The Asus series of routers usually ship with Broadcom chipsets, faster processors and more memory than average, ...

and Netgear WNR3500L. His final release of the original Tomato firmware came in June 2010, by which point its popularity had grown large enough that development and support continued through the user community, resulting in a series of releases (dubbed " mods") by individual users or teams of them that continues to the present day. Fedor Kozhevnikov created a notable early mod he called ''TomatoUSB'', which ceased development in November 2010. It was then forked by other developers and remains the nearest common ancestor to all of the forks with any recent activity. The project saw a boost in recognition when Tomato was chosen by Asus as the base used to build the firmware currently preinstalled on their entire line of home routers, ASUSWRT. Currently, FreshTomato appears to be the only project that has seen active development and new releases.

Features

Several notable features have been part of Tomato long enough to be common to all forks, among them are: * The

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

(accessed via web browser), including: ** Access to almost the entirety of the features provided by the hardware (manufacturers typically omit many of these from their firmware to prevent misuse and reduce support costs) ** Extensive use of

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Greek ...

to display only the settings that are germane to the device's current setup, reducing confusion and keeping related options near each other using fewer pages/tabs ** A

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

-based custom interface theming ** SVG-based graphical bandwidth monitoring, showing total network inbound/outbound activity and that of each connected device through pie charts and line graphs that update in real-time Tomato bandbreite real

* A personal web server (

Nginx Nginx (pronounced "engine x" ) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 2004. Nginx is free and open-source software ...

) that uses the device's "always on, always connected" design to allow users to host their own websites from home for free * Access and bandwidth restriction configurable for each device or the network as a whole, providing control over the speed and amount of traffic available at any time to any device * Unrestricted access to the internal system logs and the ability to store them for easier troubleshooting and security audits *

CLI CLI may refer to: Computing * Call Level Interface, an SQL database management API * Command-line interface, of a computer program * Command-line interpreter or command language interpreter; see List of command-line interpreters * CLI (x86 instruc ...

access (

BusyBox BusyBox is a software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file. It runs in a variety of POSIX environments such as Linux, Android, and FreeBSD, although many of the tools it provides are designed to work with in ...

) via the web-based interface, as well as via

Telnet Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control i ...

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH applications are based on ...

(using Dropbear) * Wake-on-LAN * Advanced QoS: 10 unique QoS classes defined, real-time graphs display prioritized traffic with traffic class details * Client bandwidth control via QoS classes * The

Dnsmasq dnsmasq is free software providing Domain Name System (DNS) caching, a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server, router advertisement and network boot features, intended for small computer networks. dnsmasq has low requirements for ...

software built-in, which provides: **

DHCP The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a network management protocol used on Internet Protocol (IP) networks for automatically assigning IP addresses and other communication parameters to devices connected to the network using a cli ...

server (with static allocation of IP addresses) ** Local

DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...

server (usually forwarding requests to the DNS provider of choice) * Wireless modes: ** Access point ( AP) ** Wireless client station ( STA) ** Wireless Ethernet (WET)

bridge A bridge is a structure built to span a physical obstacle (such as a body of water, valley, road, or rail) without blocking the way underneath. It is constructed for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle, which is usually somethi ...

** Wireless distribution system ( WDS also known as wireless bridging) ** Simultaneous AP and WDS (also known as wireless repeating) *

Dynamic DNS Dynamic DNS (DDNS) is a method of automatically updating a name server in the Domain Name System (DNS), often in real time, with the active DDNS configuration of its configured hostnames, addresses or other information. The term is used to desc ...

service with ezUpdate and services extended for more providers *

SES SES, S.E.S., Ses and similar variants can refere to: Business and economics * Socioeconomic status * Scottish Economic Society, a learned society in Scotland * SES, callsign of the TV station SES/RTS (Mount Gambier, South Australia) * SES S.A., ...

button control *

JFFS2 Journalling Flash File System version 2 or JFFS2 is a log-structured file system for use with flash memory devices. It is the successor to JFFS. JFFS2 has been included into the Linux kernel since September 23, 2001, when it was merged into the ...

* SMB client *

Wireless LAN A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a wireless computer network A wireless network is a computer network that uses wireless data connections between network nodes. Wireless networking is a method by which homes, telecommunications networks and bus ...

Adjustment of radio transmit power, antenna selection, and 14 wireless channels * 'Boot wait' protection (increase the time slot for uploading firmware via the boot loader) * Advanced

port forwarding In computer networking, port forwarding or port mapping is an application of network address translation (NAT) that redirects a communication request from one address and port number combination to another while the packets are traversing a netw ...

, redirection, and triggering with

UPnP Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet gateways, Wi-Fi access points and mobile devices to seamlessly discover each other's presence on the n ...

and

NAT-PMP NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP) is a network protocol for establishing network address translation (NAT) settings and port forwarding configurations automatically without user effort. The protocol automatically determines the external IPv4 a ...

Init In Unix-based computer operating systems, init (short for ''initialization'') is the first process started during booting of the computer system. Init is a daemon process that continues running until the system is shut down. It is the direct ...

, shutdown,

firewall Firewall may refer to: * Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts * Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...

, and WAN Up

scripts Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...

Uptime Uptime is a measure of system reliability, expressed as the percentage of time a machine, typically a computer, has been working and available. Uptime is the opposite of downtime. It is often used as a measure of computer operating system reliabi ...

, load average, and free memory status * Minimal reboots - Very few configuration changes require a reboot * Wireless survey page to view other networks in your neighborhood * More comprehensive

dashboard For business applications, see Dashboard (business). A dashboard (also called dash, instrument panel (IP), or fascia) is a control panel set within the central console of a vehicle or small aircraft. Usually located directly ahead of the driver ...

than stock firmware: displays signal strengths of wireless client devices, reveals UPnP mappings * Configuration persistence during a firmware upgrade

Feature comparison

Feature comparison (cont.)

References

External links