So, I decide to be a little more proactive in keeping my wireless router firmware up to date and downloaded/installed the latest and greatest version from Linksys (I have an old WRT54G v2). In the fine, long-standing tradition of no good deed going unpunished, now my formerly rock-solid router loses it's mind every few days and refuses to route outside of the local network...meaning no internet. I can ping (and access) the router, but not beyond that. If I bypass the router and hook a PC up directly to the DSL box everything works fine. If I reset my router to factory settings, it all works again for a few days, but twice now I've had to reset and go around to all my wireless devices and re-configure them so that they can get out on the Internet (for some reason, the wireless settings won't work, even though they are unchanged). This is getting to be a real PITA. Checking the Linksys forums leads me to the sad conclusion that I'm not the only one experiencing this, but as far as I can tell there's no fix forthcoming.

Now, I can certainly go and drop another $50 or so on a new one, but I'm nothing if not frugal; and since I believe this is a firmware problem, not a problem with the hardware, I'm considering re-flashing my router with an open-source firmware (DD-WRT or Tomato). If this is how my router is going to be acting from now on, I've got nothing to lose by doing this. I've read a lot of good reviews on both (however, it appears that DD-WRT may be heading more into a commercial product in the future). I'm leaning toward Tomato.

Have any of you used either DD-WRT or Tomato (especially on a Linksys) and what is your experience?