{"id":2632,"date":"2016-09-27T23:43:06","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T18:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/?p=2632"},"modified":"2022-06-16T15:19:18","modified_gmt":"2022-06-16T09:49:18","slug":"how-to-install-tomato-firmware-on-asus-rt-n53-router","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/how-to-install-tomato-firmware-on-asus-rt-n53-router\/","title":{"rendered":"How to install Tomato Firmware on Asus RT-N53 Router"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I know I am supposed to blog about the all the trips I took but wanted to get this down before I forget what I did to get the install working. I will post about the trips soon. I promise \ud83d\ude42 <\/p>\n<p>Installing an alternate firmware on my router is something I have been meaning to do for a few years now but never really had the incentive to investigate in detail as the default firmware worked fine for the most part and I didn&#8217;t really miss any of the special features I would have gotten with the new firmware. <\/p>\n<p>Yesterday my router decided to start acting funny, basically every time I started transferring large files from my phone to the desktop via sFTP over wifi the entire router would crash after about a min or so. This is something that hasn&#8217;t happened before and I have transferred gigs of data so I was stumped. Luckily I had a spare router lying around thanks to dad who forced me to carry it to Bangalore during my last visit. So I swapped the old router with the new one and got my work done. This gave me an opportunity as I had a spare router sitting on my desk and some time to kill so I decided to install a custom firmware on it to play with it. <\/p>\n<p>I was initially planning on installing dd-wrt on it but their site was refusing to let me download the file for the RT-N53 model even though the wiki said that I should be able to install it. A quick web search suggested that folks have had a good experience with the <a href=\"http:\/\/tomato.groov.pl\/\">Tomato by Shibby<\/a> firmware so I downloaded and installed it by following these steps:<\/p>\n<p><b>Download the firmware file<\/b><\/p>\n<p>First we need to download the firmware file from the Tomato Download site. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Visit the <a href=\"http:\/\/tomato.groov.pl\/download\/K26RT-N\/\">Tomato download Section<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Click on the latest Build folder. (I used build5x-138-MultiWAN)<\/li>\n<li>Click on &#8216;Asus RT-Nxx&#8217; folder<\/li>\n<li>Download the &#8216;MAX&#8217; zip file as that has all the functionality. (I used the <a href='http:\/\/tomato.groov.pl\/download\/K26RT-N\/build5x-138-MultiWAN\/Asus%20RT-Nxx\/tomato-K26-1.28.RT-N5x-MIPSR2-138-Max.zip'>tomato-K26-1.28.RT-N5x-MIPSR2-138-Max.zip<\/a> file.)<\/li>\n<li>Save the file locally<\/li>\n<li>Extract the ZIP file. The file we are interested in is under the <i>&#8216;image&#8217;<\/i> folder with a <i>.trx<\/i> extension<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Restart the Router in Maintenance mode<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Turn off power to router<\/li>\n<li>Turn the power back on while holding down the reset button<\/li>\n<li>Keep holding reset until the power light starts flashing which will mean router is in recovery mode<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Set a Static IP on the Ethernet adapter of your computer<\/b><\/p>\n<p>For some reason, you need to set the IP address of the computer you are using to a static IP of <i>192.168.1.2<\/i> with subnet 255.255.255.0 and gateway 192.168.1.1. If you skip this step then the firmware upload fails with an integrity check error. <\/p>\n<p><b>Upload the new firmware<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Connect the router to a computer using a LAN cable<\/li>\n<li>Visit 192.168.1.1<\/li>\n<li>Login as admin\/admin<\/li>\n<li>Click Advanced Setting from the navigation menu at the left side of your screen.<\/li>\n<li>Under the Administration menu, click Firmware Upgrade.<\/li>\n<li>In the New Firmware File field, click Browse to locate the new firmware file that you downloaded in the previous step<\/li>\n<li>Click Upload. The uploading process takes about 5 minutes.<\/li>\n<li>Then unplug the router, wait 30 seconds.  <\/li>\n<li>Hold down the WPS button while plugging it back in.<\/li>\n<li>Wait 30 seconds and release the WPS button. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now you should be using the new firmware. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Browse to 192.168.1.1<\/li>\n<li>Login as admin\/password (if that doesn&#8217;t work try admin\/admin)<\/li>\n<li>Click on the &#8216;reset nvram to defaults&#8217; link in the page that comes up. (I had to do this before the system started working but apparently its not always required.) <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Configure your new firmware<\/b><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s it, you have a router with a working Tomato install. Go ahead and configure it as per your requirements. All functionality seems to be working for me except the 5GHz network which seems to have disappeared. I will play around with the settings a bit more to see if I can get it to work but as I hardly ever connected to the 5GHz network its not a big deal for me. <\/p>\n<p><b>References<\/b><\/p>\n<p>The following sites and posts helped me complete the install successfully. Without them I would have spent way longer getting things to work:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.snbforums.com\/threads\/problems-updating-firmware-rt-n66u.7202\/\">http:\/\/www.snbforums.com\/threads\/problems-updating-firmware-rt-n66u.7202\/<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/aquainferno.empowernetwork.com\/blog\/tomato-firmware-on-the-asus-rt-n53\">http:\/\/aquainferno.empowernetwork.com\/blog\/tomato-firmware-on-the-asus-rt-n53<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/moonlightknighthk.wordpress.com\/2012\/02\/04\/install-tomato-firmware-on-asus-router\/\">https:\/\/moonlightknighthk.wordpress.com\/2012\/02\/04\/install-tomato-firmware-on-asus-router\/<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Well this is it for now. Will post more later.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; Suramya<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I know I am supposed to blog about the all the trips I took but wanted to get this down before I forget what I did to get the install working. I will post about the trips soon. I promise \ud83d\ude42 Installing an alternate firmware on my router is something I have been meaning to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18,24,2,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-software","category-knowledgebase","category-techie-stuff","category-tutorials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2632"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2637,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632\/revisions\/2637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}