I've had the ASUS router for a little over a year now and love it. It has been one of the best routers in terms of range, speed, quality of connection (no drops) and ease of management (the firmware). However, I wanted to dig into it a little more and try a few things out (cause I'm a geek). But the firmware could did not have any advanced features. So I started looking into DD-WRT and much to my surprise the RT-AC66U was supported by DD-WRT. Awesome!
Turns out there were many options for me. After some digging I found out that ASUS' firmware was based on Tomato, a sister/cousin of DD-WRT. ASUS had put a lot of effort into making it very friendly and pretty, but underneath was Tomato. The other thing that I found out was that ASUS had made it VERY easy to switch back to stock firmware.
I found Merlin's Asuswrt-Merlin which is based on ASUS' code. He's even contributed back to ASUS with bug fixes and new features. I tried Merlin's version and I like it: very close to the beautiful ASUS UI, zero learning curve. But in the end not enough features I was interested it.
In the end I chose DD-WRT because it had all of the features I would need PLUS SOME! Plenty of gurus and fanboys, and lot's of instructions already out there. I like to geek out but don't have time to reinvent the wheel. Specifically, I chose Kong's releases since he seemed to be leading the charge with my model router.
The main blog I used to walk be through the installation was Victor's Blog. I ended up switching back to stock firmware for a couple days because DD-WRT would not route WAN traffic. Turns out step #8 was critical, you had to CLEAR NVRAM again. The next time I tried it - and used the correct command - everything worked perfectly!
In the next few days, I'll post my configuration changes to work the way I need.
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