Strange behavior behind Tomato router

[bwarden]

I'm using a WRT54G with Tomato, and today upgraded from 1.23 to 1.25. Afterward, my PAP2T absolutely would not re-register, no matter how many times I reset or power-cycled it.

I dug around through all the settings in Tomato and couldn't find anything weird, so I finally dusted off my old 10Base-T hub and started capturing traffic. From behind the router, everything looked fine -- the PAP2T was sending out its registration requests, but never getting a response. I popped a USB ethernet adapter into my main PC and moved the hub around between the FiOS ONT and the router. Then the problem was clear -- Tomato was not NATting the PAP2T's requests. They were going out with the non-routable LAN source address, and of course, no replies were coming in.

I finally unplugged the PAP2T from power to shut it up, purged the idle forwarded connections and deleted the PAP2T's lease in Tomato, then plugged the PAP2T back in -- success!

I did not try resetting the Tomato router. I remember when I first installed 1.23, the PAP2T could not register until the next morning sometime, and I never found out why. I think there's something funny about Tomato's state tracking if it boots up after the PAP2T has already been registered.

Anybody else have similar experiences?

[jimmy the saint]

I have had issues with tomato as well. There are a lot of posts on these forums about tomato's inability to play nice with voipo's hardware, but I haven't seen anyone get as far as you have in isolating the exact nature of the problem. If you know your way around the inner workings of the router, you should submit a bug. If you aren't, perhaps we can work together to get a decent bug report going so that the tomato maintainer can fix the issue.

[Xponder1]

I recommend you use DDWRT. It works with VOIPo and is a great alternative to the nasty stuff Linksys calls firmware.

[ptrowski]

Another Tomato to DD-WRT convert here. The latest release of Tomato just wasn't VoIP friendly in my opinion. After moving to DD-WRT things have been quiet excpet for an Xbox 360 Nat situation.

[scott2020]

Another Tomato to DD-WRT convert here. The latest release of Tomato just wasn't VoIP friendly in my opinion. After moving to DD-WRT things have been quiet excpet for an Xbox 360 Nat situation.

How has your QOS been with the latest DD-WRT? In the past I have found Tomato's to be superior. I am still running Tomato 1.23 and all is well. I think I will stay with 1.23 for awhile!

[1bird2]

Tomato 1.23 or 1.25 does not handle VoIP well, after a reboot of the router. I went through a series of issues with VoIP losing registration, during the period of problems that VoIPo had. However, while watching this series of events, I also uncovered a problem with my Linksys router rebooting about every 3 to 4 days on it's own. When that happened, the ATA would lose connection and not register and after 10 to 20 minutes, vPanel would show no devices registered and the ATA status lights would go dim (except for network and power of course). The only way to resolve was to remove power to ATA for about 30 to 45 seconds and re-power. BTW, I use Static DHCP. While this was not a good work-around (especially while at work and wife/kids complaining when phone did not work), I configured the ATA into my DMZ and I am able to login to the ATA from anywhere I have a connection (which is almost anywhere/anytime as I have connectivity at work and broadband on my laptop). I would login as admin and change the IP address of the ATA, causing it to reboot after the save. This work-around is acceptable to me. On the Linksys front, only thing I could find was that using the router as an AP was the culprit. I turned off AP mode and I have not seen a reboot in weeks (except when I upgraded to Tomato 1.25). I also went on eBay and bought a WRT54GS model, which has more ram. I have been running this on Tomato 1.25 as well, with no problems. I went to Frys and bought a cheap Trendnet WIreless G AP and to use instead. All if fine now.

Tomato's ease of use, graphing, and QoS settings are excellent. I will not being going to anything else. Also, after I installed Tomato, the amount of BW or packets the router could process went up about 30%. You can not beat the combination of the Linksys router ($50 on ebay or less) with Tomato (free), and a small UPS ($40) for the DSL/Cable modem and router.

-bird

[Xponder1]

Tomato's ease of use, graphing, and QoS settings are excellent. I will not being going to anything else. Also, after I installed Tomato, the amount of BW or packets the router could process went up about 30%. You can not beat the combination of the Linksys router ($50 on ebay or less) with Tomato (free), and a small UPS ($40) for the DSL/Cable modem and router.

-bird

DDWRT does all that and it does it better.

[bwarden]

I also uncovered a problem with my Linksys router rebooting about every 3 to 4 days on it's own...On the Linksys front, only thing I could find was that using the router as an AP was the culprit. I turned off AP mode and I have not seen a reboot in weeks

Did you increase the wireless transmit power? Aside from most likely exceeding legal power limits for an FCC part 15 radio device, this has been reported to cause stability problems, especially with drastic increases.

[bwarden]

DDWRT does all that and it does it better.

Can you quantify that? I'm always curious about alternatives, but your comment doesn't really add anything.

[1bird2]

Did you increase the wireless transmit power? Aside from most likely exceeding legal power limits for an FCC part 15 radio device, this has been reported to cause stability problems, especially with drastic increases.

I did not, kept the power with the default level

[1bird2]

DDWRT does all that and it does it better.

Won't get into "mine is better than yours" argument. But, DDWRT does NOT do it all -- out of the box. You should check your info. There are many open source (and free) plug-ins you can add to DDWRT, to allow some of the things that Tomato does. I will just leave it at that.....

[Darrena]

I fixed my issue with Tomato by setting:
Advanced->Conntrack / Netfilter->UDP ->Unreplied to 10 seconds from 30 seconds

[bwarden]

I fixed my issue with Tomato by setting:
Advanced->Conntrack / Netfilter->UDP ->Unreplied to 10 seconds from 30 seconds

That's a good idea. Due to unrelated issues, I reset my Tomato router today, and had to clean up the mess again. I did the following at the console to avoid a flash write:


# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_udp_timeouts
30 180
# echo 0 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_udp_timeouts
# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_udp_timeouts
0 0
# echo 30 180 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_udp_timeouts
# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_udp_timeouts
30 180
And it worked...

You can check the current states via:


# cat /proc/net/ip_conntrack