Freshtomato Not Broadcasting 5GHz SSID After Setting Wireless Country

If you have set your Wireless Country / Region to USA and lose the broadcast of your 5GHz radio, make sure you also set your Country Rev to 0.

References

https://wiki.freshtomato.org/doku.php/wireless?s[]=%2Aregion%2A#country_region

Configuring FreshTomato for Pi-hole

There are several ways to enable Pi-hole on your network. If you are running FreshTomato, the easiest way is to update the DNS server setting of FreshTomato.

First, assign a static IP to your Pi-hole server. You will need the MAC address for the network interface you are using. Assign an IP to Pi-hole, eg. 192.168.1.250. Under Basic->Static DHCP/ARP/IPT, add the static IP assignment. Save the settings. You may need to restart your Pi-hole server to get the correct static IP.

Second, point the DNS server to the Pi-hole server. Under Basic->Network->WAN Settings, select Manual under DNS Server. Set DNS 1 to 192.168.1.250, and set DNS 2 to 0.0.0.0. Save the settings.

That's it.

FreshTomato Firmware for Belkin Share Max N300

FreshTomato is a new firmware project forked off from Tomato by Shibby. I have gotten this working on the Belkin N300 (F7D7301/F7D8301) routers.

FreshTomato
https://exotic.se/freshtomato/

The firmware downloads are here.
https://exotic.se/freshtomato-mips/

You can navigate to the release of your choice. Inside, you will want to go the K26 folder and look for the filenames beginning with freshtomato-K26USB_RT-MIPSR2-*. From the information I can gather from the web, the keyword RT is critical and the keyword MIPSR2 is critical for the F7D7301/F7D8301 series.

The next choice you will need to make is what features you want in the firmware build. See below for a reference guide. You will need to make sure that the file size of the firmware is under 8MB as this is what can be supported by the N300 router. Keep in mind that the files at the distribution link are zipped. You will need to unzip the files to see its actual size.

I was successful in flashing the file named freshtomato-K26USB_RT-MIPSR2-2019.3.330-beta-Big-VPN.trx onto the F7D8301.

References

Note this reference guide was taken from another Tomato firmware project. But you can use it as a reference when choosing features.