So, this Netgear router went on to become a brick and could not be resurrected from the dead. But I had an old WRT54GL still lying around that could be used until I decide which router to buy as a replacement.

Unfortunately, as the WRT54GL is now 10 years old, neither DD-WRT nor OpenWRT ships any recent version of their firmware for this model. So what else is out there?

Enter Tomato, yet another firmware-for-your-router-project. And while the original project appears to be dormant, many mods were created and some of them are still active. I went with the most recent one, called Tomato by Shibby which offers images with both the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernel. I went with the latest K26 release (for MIPS1) that would fit into the 4 MB of flash memory on this router:

$ w3m http://tomato.groov.pl/download/K26/build5x-131-EN/ | grep MIPSR1 | sort -nk4
file   tomato-K26-1.28.RT-MIPSR1-131-MiniIPv6.zip         2015-08-06 3610
file   tomato-K26-1.28.RT-MIPSR1-131-Mini.zip             2015-08-06 3786
file   tomato-K26-1.28.RT-MIPSR1-131-MiniVPN.zip          2015-08-06 4157

Verify the checksum:

$ wget http://tomato.groov.pl/download/K26/build5x-131-EN/MD5SUM
$ md5sum -c MD5SUM 2>&1 | grep OK
image/tomato-K26-1.28.RT-MIPSR1-131-MiniIPv6.trx: OK

The Tomato image can be installed through the DD-WRT or OpenWRT GUI, as the firmware should be recognized by both systems. On OpenWRT, this can also be done from the command line:

sysupgrade -v -n tomato.trx

With that, Tomato by Shibby was up & running on this old WRT54GL :-)

$ ssh router
Tomato v1.28.0000 MIPSR1-131 K26 MiniIPv6
 ======================================================== 
 Welcome to the Linksys WRT54G/GS/GL [router]
 Uptime:  14:15:23 up 1 day, 14:40
 Load average: 0.22, 0.05, 0.01
 Mem : used 92.2% (11.78 of 12.78 MB)
 WAN : 12.34.56.78/22 @ 00:12:23:34:45:56
 LAN : 192.168.0.1/24 @ DHCP: 192.168.0.100 - 192.168.0.149
 WL0 : SSID @ channel: Worldwide9 @ 00:12:34:56:78:90
 ========================================================