How I bypassed Asus and installed Tomato on my RT-AC66U

[skarz]

A friend recently gave me his Asus RT-AC66U and said I was free to play around with it and experiment. After realizing that OpenWRT and DD-WRT were not viable firmware options, I looked in to Tomato. Seeing tons of successful installs on this particular router, I decided to give it a while.

Sometime between the time of those posts I had read and yesterday, apparently Asus began blocking third-party firmware (not sure which exact firmware release did that.)

Following the guide on shadowandy.net, I was presented with the following message from Asus:

"To comply with regulatory amendments, we have modified our certification rule to ensure better firmware quality. This version is not compatible with all previously released ASUS firmware and uncertified third party firmware. Please check our official websites for the certified firmware."

Not wanting to give up so early, I decided to play around with Asus WRT-Merlin. After checking that out for a few hours I thought I'd try flashing the Tomato firmware again. And guess what - it WORKED!!

I cannot say with 100% certainty that flashing AsusWRT-Merlin first is what lead to me being able to load Tomato as there are many, many variables, but for now that's what I am concluding. Hope this helps someone out there.

 

[KevTech]

Could of just used the Asus restoration tool or the CFE miniWeb Server.

 

[skarz]

Could of just used the Asus restoration tool or the CFE miniWeb Server.

View attachment 16095

The restoration tool is Windows only, right? I only have access to Macs.

 

[Pierino]

The cfe mini web server is built into the router. Also there is dd-wrt for the rt-ac66u. Has been available for years.

 

[skarz]

The cfe mini web server is built into the router. Also there is dd-wrt for the rt-ac66u. Has been available for years.

From what I have read, DD-WRT is very unstable on the AC66U. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Pierino]

Depends which build. I’ve had one running dd-wrt for years.

 

[CHuntMD]

Did DD-WRT drop support for the RT-AC66R/U ? I don't see it in their router database.
CEH in MD

Depends which build. I’ve had one running dd-wrt for years.

 

[Pierino]

Here is the latest as of yesterday. ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/betas/2019/02-19-2019-r38840/asus-rt-ac66u/

As to which firmware is stable, would check the new build threads on the dd-wt forum.

 

[Bong!]

My retired AC-66U worked fine with dd-wrt v31899, no stability problem, with newer version, i don't know. It was a 1st type of AC-66U, that can be moded. Then I used AdvancedTomato(v1.40, https://advancedtomato.com/), only because its using is widely more simple than dd-wrt for basic using.
From stock firmware, I went to Merlin, then stock firmware, then Tomato, so I don't know if there is an order to be follow from stock to Tomato. The Shibby's site(http://tomato.groov.pl) is an intersting source of knowledge.

 

[coxhaus]

The old site for Tomato stuff that I go to is

https://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?forums/tomato-firmware.33/

I liked Tomato in the real old days many many years ago. I wonder if Shibby is updating the kernel now in Tomato?

 

[Bong!]

according to this page of its website http://tomato.groov.pl/?page_id=78, yes, there are updates of the kernel

 

[coxhaus]

I am now thinking not on the kernel upgrade. If you look on the link posted by me and under the listing about WireGuard in FreshTomato soon? which was posted yesterday the response is the kernel is too old.

 

[Bong!]

The trunk of kernel, that true, it's ancient, but inside the existing kernel(in Tomato)there is some upgrade as we can see in Shibby's page.
Reading your link I now understand why I had so many problem with my attempts of dual wan with Tomato.
Anyway, for the VPN, Merlin is faster than dd-wrt and Tomato, so... For me the choice is made.