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.
- Go to the web interface, Administration, then Upgrade.
- Select the file for the new firmware image, then click Upgrade.
- 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.