Upgrading Tomato Router on Linksys E3200

Over a year ago, I put Tomato, an alternative router firmware, on my Cisco Linksys E3200 wireless broadband router. Several new versions have been released since then, but I’ve been procrastinating about upgrading. I finally got around to it the last long weekend, and it turns out that it was far more straight-forward than I had anticipated.

Tomato, in case you’re not familiar, is an alternative router firmware like DD-WRT and OpenWRT. I had not considered using OpenWRT. Between Tomato and DD-WRT, at that time, the latter did not support the 5 GHz radio on the Linksys E3200. Hence, I chose to go with Tomato router.

The tough part of upgrading to Tomato is when you’re coming from a different firmware, such as the stock that came with the router. I crossed that bridge previously, and you can read about that upgrading process, putting Tomato on the Linksys E3200.

I was a little concerned, but it turns out upgrading Tomato to a new version when you already have Tomato installed is really easy. In fact, it’s not different from how you’d expect to upgrade any consumer router.

1. Go to the web interface, Administration, then Upgrade.
2. Select the file for the new firmware image, then click Upgrade.
3. Wait.

That’s it, couldn’t be any simpler. I was hesitant because other folks on the Internet still talk about the 30-30-30 reset procedure, or at the least to clear NVRAM. Well, I did none of them.

Just for your interest, I was running version 116, and I upgraded to version 128. There’s only one E3200 image in the directory, and I was also a bit concerned it was a “Mega-VPN” flavour, whereas I came from the “AIO” flavour, but everything turned out okay and I don’t seem to see any glaring difference in the firmware features. In particular, the Astrill VPN plugin I had installed continued to work just fine.