tomato firmware
Apr 18, 2007, 05:02am EDT
I’m a big fan of tomato firmware which I’ve been running on the apartment router for a few months now. It includes a lot of the basic stuff I look for in a router (static IP addresses, traffic shaping, etc). But my favorite feature is the inclusion of Dnsmasq which allows me to set fake internal host names. Now when I type in “w” into my browser url bar, the internal wiki loads. When I type “m”, the interal music player loads. [1]
I found the documentation to be a bit confusing, so I’ll include part of our configuration. This is text copied from Advanced -> DHCP / DNS -> Custom Configuration text area in the tomato firmware admin interface.
domain=local address=/wiki.local/w.local/music.local/m.local/192.168.50.102 address=/router.local/192.168.50.1 address=/printer.local/print.local/192.168.50.150
The first line is important: it sets the domain name for the internal network. Without that line, OSX won’t properly resolve these names.
The second line maps wiki, w, music, and m to 192.168.50.102. The computer at 192.168.50.102 already has a name (it happens to be “shake”), so these are in addition to the existing hostname. Mix in some virtual hosts and it appears like multiple services.
The third line gives a nice alias for the router itself and the fourth line contains aliases for the print server.
[1] These shortcuts actually collide with work intranet aliases when I’m VPN’ed in. In that case, I have to write out w.local or m.local to disambiguate.
jbroome at Apr 18, 2007, 11:55am EDT
Your tomato firmware link is missing a “h”.
Matt Belcher at Apr 18, 2007, 02:01pm EDT
Wow these are all very useful. Thanks!
Josh at Jul 31, 2007, 09:25pm EDT
*Please* don’t use .local for these names. .local represents the mDNS (“Zeroconf”, “Bonjour”, “Rendezvous”, etc) top-level domain. Apple machines, or GNU/Linux machines running a Zeroconf stack like Avahi, can automatically assign these names amongst themselves; for instance, a machine named “music” will automatically claim the name “music.local” if nothing else does. If you use .local for centralized DNS, you break that. I suggest something like .lan instead.
Josh at Jul 31, 2007, 09:25pm EDT
Also, you might find Firefox keyword bookmarks useful.
bqw at Apr 14, 2010, 08:30am EDT
I’ve run into problems with .local before too.
I know it’s way after the fact, but I just wanted to write that this page was actually helpful to me because I need to map some addresses and had difficulty finding good information about what to put in the custom dnsmasq box in tomato.
mtlemmonrunner at Jun 11, 2010, 09:29pm EDT
I feel like a puppy here but here it goes with a firmware for opensource routers named common within the google bunch it gets less helpful to me.
Okay sorry I said that but I am not kidding around search for tomato and you get the things you eat I know iknow please wait.
Tomato firmware for opensource routers is correct thanks so much. The name Tomato for this correctness is the issue please excuse my French!!! I know proveit it…
Please excuse me for this but I need not prove it DD-WRT searches in google already did that.