Somewhere around a year ago, my wireless router took an unplanned shower. Fearing the worst, my wife went out and purchased a new router – a Linksys WRT54GL to replace the older Linux powered WRT54G that we already had. Until tonight, the old router sat in a kitchen cabinet. That was when I took a notion to install the Tomato firmware on it, assuming it still had life in it. Thankfully, it did. I performed the upgrade and configured it to replace the one that I had in place.

Since the upgrade went so well, I upgraded the other router and set it up as a wireless bridge to improve the signal on the lower level of the house. I found this tutorial, which made it nice and easy. My current setup is the original WRT54G (named Nitrogen) upstairs acting as the host or primary router and the WRT54GL (named Oxygen) downstairs acting as a bridge. I’ll write about my naming scheme at a later date, but it’s based on the periodic table.

Despite the relative ease of the whole process, I did run into a snag. The upgrade kept failing with the delightfully Engrishy ‘Upgrade are failed!’ when I tried it from Safari (on Snow Leopard). Once I switched to Firefox, it went through first time.