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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

There is also a project that provides an open firmware for some of the vulnerable Asus routers:

https://code.google.com/p/rt-n56u/

It seems to be active. I've been thinking of switching to it from a stock rt-n56u. Anyone have any experience using this firmware?

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I haven't tried that one. I'm using asuswrt-merlin [0], which is another fork based on the official Asus sources.

It's very similar to the original firmware, but with a few extra bug fixes and features. Asus occasionally backports some of the bug fixes to the official firmware. The vulnerable feature has been disabled in the latest version. [1]

[0] https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin

[1] http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=21774

+1 for asuswrt-merlin. It's the Cyanogenmod of the router world: the stability and speed of officially supported drivers, with the added flexibility and freedom of a custom firmware.

I wouldn't say its quite as stable, but it is close.

That doesn't seem to be on the RT-56U which the OP has.

Why not use a good Tomato build? This is my favourite at the moment and gets updated quite frequently:

http://tomato.groov.pl/

Saw that one, but my router was not in the list of supported ones.

my apologies, I misread RT-N56U for RT-AC56U.

OpenWrt[1] supports many devices, too, and has a strong emphasis on free/open source software. (Tomato uses a proprietary GUI.)

The rt-n56u appears to have preliminary support. [2]

[1] http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start [2] http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-n56u

After great success with Polarcloud's Tomato on the old WRT54G, I really wanted to use tomato on my AC66U, which is on "Tomato by Shibby"'s supported list, but it resolutely refused to run; same story with OpenWRT. Merlin's build seems to be the only reliable choice for Asuswrt, or at least that's my experience.

Running DD-WRT v24 sp2 on my N66U here. It works like a charm and you can customize the OS all you want since it's Linux-based.

Any reason you went with DD-WRT instead of OpenWRT (just curious)?

I've been a DD-WRT user for many years now. I have considered the other options before installing DD-WRT on the N66U (which I received just after Christmas), but none of them were offering significantly better functionalities over DD-WRT for what I needed, so I just went with what I knew worked well.

I have 2 routers running DD-WRT (RT-N66U as my main router and TP-WR1043ND as a wireless bridge) and it works like a charm.

Do you know if its possible to somehow get the 66 to "split" a connection somehow,

For example lets say i have a 100mbit symmetric connection coming in with the 66 siting on the end of it as the home office router, can i somehow dedicate 10mbit of this to be used only by the wired network and remaining 90 available to the wireless

So if someone is downloading/uploading too much it never can use more than lets say 90% of the external wan connection

seems like you should be able to define a qos policy to apply to frames tagged on the wireless vs wired, and apply it on the uplink.. pretty sure they do show up at individual interfaces. problem with torrent or anything is, you dont have very fine control of the incoming frames from the provider. used to run game servers, and the incoming discovery packets would fill up the inbound after a while, even if you throttled the existing clients, there wasn't much you could do.

Are you really looking to limit the speed available to wireless clients, or are you just trying to limit the impact a wireless device can have on the performance experienced by the wired devices? Reserving some external bandwidth as wired-only is a pretty crude way to accomplish the latter.

Any time you have a bandwidth sharing issue, the first step should be to rate-limit the router to just below the modem's speed (thereby preventing the modem's bufferbloat from kicking in) and apply an advanced qdisc to your router's WAN interface (preferably fq_codel if your software is new enough). That will keep latency from going sky-high when the WAN connection gets saturated, and ensure fair mixing of competing flows.

Only if that is insufficient should you move on to more barbaric strategies like overtly singling out certain clients or protocols for special treatment, since those policies are high-maintenance and often prevent the second-class citizens from getting full performance even when the network is otherwise idle.

DD-WRT allows you to do this using its QoS service. You can specify rules by range of IPs or by MAC adresses, so this definitively is possible.

You can also set rules regarding specific groups of services (games, torrent, netflix, etc.).

If you want a more powerful way to control your bandwidth, DD-WRT has iptables installed, which can be configured by connecting to the router through SSH. The possibilities using iptables are pretty much limitless, but there is a level of complexity that is completely abstracted when using the QoS service.

For more information, see:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Quality_of_Service

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Iptables_command

Or, just use the Asus' own QoS system.The newer routers actually have a fairly fancy one. But neither of these has a way to limit directly by interface, do they?

Tomato by Shibby can use QoS on vlans, and that makes it possible to apply traffic shaping on different interfaces.

There is also an OpenWRT version: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-n56u

But it doesn't seem very well supported since 2012.

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