I did indeed follow both the discussion here and the comments on his post closely! I wasted/spent a good 6+ hours reading about all kinds of router features that I had didn't know existed, or never even thought possible (VLANs, VPN, NFS, CIFS, Captive Portal, router CPU overclocking, etc). Some versions of Tomato (Shibby's firmware [1] in particular) allow the router to act as a BitTorrent client! I'm sure it's old news to some, but for anyone on the fence about trying new firmware on their routers - take the plunge.
I have an ASUS RT-N16 router at home, which I connected to a hard-drive by USB. Then with Tomato installed, you can SSH into the router and install optware. Then you can configure optware[1] to install its packages on the external hard-drive. From there, you can retrieve and install a bunch of packages, like http servers, bittorrent clients and whatever else you feel like running from the CLI. Pretty convenient! I installed Transmission with a web-gui and I can SSH into it from anywhere in the world to my house's router, load a magnet or torrent in the queue and when I get home, the content will be waiting for me on my hard-drive.
I don't pretend Tomato firmware are the first to allow to do so, but I just found it was an interesting and usefull thing.
Comments
Don't miss the previous discussion of Jeff's post here on Hacker News for more details and alternatives:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4127393
I did indeed follow both the discussion here and the comments on his post closely! I wasted/spent a good 6+ hours reading about all kinds of router features that I had didn't know existed, or never even thought possible (VLANs, VPN, NFS, CIFS, Captive Portal, router CPU overclocking, etc). Some versions of Tomato (Shibby's firmware [1] in particular) allow the router to act as a BitTorrent client! I'm sure it's old news to some, but for anyone on the fence about trying new firmware on their routers - take the plunge.
[1]: http://tomato.groov.pl/
I have an ASUS RT-N16 router at home, which I connected to a hard-drive by USB. Then with Tomato installed, you can SSH into the router and install optware. Then you can configure optware[1] to install its packages on the external hard-drive. From there, you can retrieve and install a bunch of packages, like http servers, bittorrent clients and whatever else you feel like running from the CLI. Pretty convenient! I installed Transmission with a web-gui and I can SSH into it from anywhere in the world to my house's router, load a magnet or torrent in the queue and when I get home, the content will be waiting for me on my hard-drive.
I don't pretend Tomato firmware are the first to allow to do so, but I just found it was an interesting and usefull thing.
[1] http://tomatousb.org/tut:optware-installation