Tomato is a family of community-developed, custom firmware for consumer-grade computer networkingrouters and gateways powered by Broadcomchipsets. 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 kernel and drawing extensively on the code of HyperWRT. It was targeted at many popular routers of the time, most notably the older Linksys WRT54G series, Buffalo AirStation, Asus routers and Netgear WNR3500L.[2] 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.[3] It was then forked by other developers[4] 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.[5][6]
Currently, FreshTomato appears to be the only project that has seen active development and new releases.[7]
Features
Several notable features have been part of Tomato long enough to be common to all forks, among them are:
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 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
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 live bandwidth monitor
A personal web server (Nginx) 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
^Teaman Mod Home page. Augusto Bott is the author of the VLANs GUI, Per-IP Traffic Stats (author of cstats, which keeps per-IP data/track/history), Client Monitor Graphs (author of IPTraffic) and author of the Guest SSID GUI.
^Toastman Mod Home page. Tomato builds with many useful added features. Lean, stable, and fast with minimal bells and whistles, with a focus on QoS and Administration. Based on TomatoUSB and RT (selected features included from other firmware, plus new mods).
