Tomato Firmware for WGR614L Review - v1.11.041510

This review is about the latest release of the Tomato firmware released on 17 th April.

Firmware Name - tomato_wgr614l.chk

The above link contains a zip archive which contains the aforesaid 'chk' image which has been tested. Please Note that I have not been able to test all the features of the Great Tomato firmware. I will discuss about the bugs that I have found till date and obviously regarding the bugs that has been solved in this release. Thanks to the development team for making this version available to the forum.

Bugs Solved in this release:
======================

1. Firmware Upgrade issue has been resolved. Any Netgear compatible chk image can be installed successfully through this image. The great thing here is - you do not need to open up the router. Just buy any WGR614L router from your nearest dealer and install this firmware from the 'Router Upgrade' page of the Default Netgear firmware (refer to the blog by Tathagata Das) if you really like to feel the essence of the great Tomato firmware which has earned a huge popularity throughout the globe. Please note that this will void the warranty from Netgear. And if you again feel that Tomato does not suit you revert back to the Default Netgear image just from UI (refer to the blog by Tathagata Das). Hey, it looks so simple... this time.

2. Wireless gets enabled automatically even if you reset the board - this issue has also been resolved. Don't worry if you really messed up the settings, do the factory reset. Your wireless will be up in next reboot.

3. LAN connection remains as usual even after changing any WAN parameters. The previous Tomato release has a problem - if you modify any WAN settings the LAN connection used to get lost. This was a peculiar problem and it is great to see that this issue has also been fixed in this release.

Bugs in this release
================

1. Wireless disabling problem still remains in this release. Wireless radio turns on with the factory default settings but once it turned on can not be turned off anymore. The 'Status Overview' page shows disable button but it does not work.

2. After factory reset DHCP server end IP does not get initialized with correct Value. In the 'Basic Network' page the 'DHCP server end IP' shows some garbage value. It should initialized with some default IP in the router's LAN subnet.

3. For Wireless, only WEP and disabled security works perfectly. I have been able to test 64 bit WEP only. 128 bit WEP is yet to be tested. While testing the wireless I have came across some absurd behavior. My observation is as follows,
i. When the AP is configured for WPA (both Personal and Enterprise), it goes out of vicinity. This AP has not been found from the clients around it. It holds true for both TKIP and AES. Since I have the serial console as well I tried to do some analysis of this issue - the wireless module 'wl' is still inserted in the kernel and hence 'ifconfig' command also shows the interface attributes correctly. Disabling/Enabling this interface using the wlconf tool does not revert the scenario as well. I will continue to look into this issue once I have some time.
ii. When the AP is configured with WPA2 (both personal and Enterprise) surprisingly the AP comes into vicinity but with no security. All the adjacent station shows this AP as a non-secured one and eventually they can connect to this AP as well. So in case of WPA2 this firmware probably can set the SSID, channel and the other parameters to the wireless driver except the WPA2 specific ones. That's why this AP is still configured as non-secured one. This status page shows that it is WPA2 configured. I was wondering that the status page does not get information from the wireless driver - probably it just read out the configuration section. I have not been able to check the code in details but will do that surely.

4. Basic Wireless Filter has some issues. If I specify a particular MAC address and set the policy to 'Block the following clients' it works fine - the connection gets lost if that particular MAC is already connected. But if the policy changed to 'Permit only the following client' without changing the MAC - it malfunctions - the connection can not be established anymore.

Thats all for now - actually these are result of the Quick test I have been able to perform at my side. I will add more blogs once I compete the procedure. Hope many other people will come up with new bugs of this release so that we will be able to release a bug free version quickly.