I've been a DD-WRT user for many years now. I have considered the other options before installing DD-WRT on the N66U (which I received just after Christmas), but none of them were offering significantly better functionalities over DD-WRT for what I needed, so I just went with what I knew worked well.
I have 2 routers running DD-WRT (RT-N66U as my main router and TP-WR1043ND as a wireless bridge) and it works like a charm.
Do you know if its possible to somehow get the 66 to "split" a connection somehow,
For example lets say i have a 100mbit symmetric connection coming in with the 66 siting on the end of it as the home office router, can i somehow dedicate 10mbit of this to be used only by the wired network and remaining 90 available to the wireless
So if someone is downloading/uploading too much it never can use more than lets say 90% of the external wan connection
DD-WRT allows you to do this using its QoS service. You can specify rules by range of IPs or by MAC adresses, so this definitively is possible.
You can also set rules regarding specific groups of services (games, torrent, netflix, etc.).
If you want a more powerful way to control your bandwidth, DD-WRT has iptables installed, which can be configured by connecting to the router through SSH. The possibilities using iptables are pretty much limitless, but there is a level of complexity that is completely abstracted when using the QoS service.
Or, just use the Asus' own QoS system.The newer routers actually have a fairly fancy one. But neither of these has a way to limit directly by interface, do they?
Are you really looking to limit the speed available to wireless clients, or are you just trying to limit the impact a wireless device can have on the performance experienced by the wired devices? Reserving some external bandwidth as wired-only is a pretty crude way to accomplish the latter.
Any time you have a bandwidth sharing issue, the first step should be to rate-limit the router to just below the modem's speed (thereby preventing the modem's bufferbloat from kicking in) and apply an advanced qdisc to your router's WAN interface (preferably fq_codel if your software is new enough). That will keep latency from going sky-high when the WAN connection gets saturated, and ensure fair mixing of competing flows.
Only if that is insufficient should you move on to more barbaric strategies like overtly singling out certain clients or protocols for special treatment, since those policies are high-maintenance and often prevent the second-class citizens from getting full performance even when the network is otherwise idle.
seems like you should be able to define a qos policy to apply to frames tagged on the wireless vs wired, and apply it on the uplink.. pretty sure they do show up at individual interfaces. problem with torrent or anything is, you dont have very fine control of the incoming frames from the provider. used to run game servers, and the incoming discovery packets would fill up the inbound after a while, even if you throttled the existing clients, there wasn't much you could do.