As we found out on last week; zar' updated his WRT54G v5 router much as I did. It went off without a hitch.
He has a WRT54G v1 as well, and gave that a try. Did it succeed? Well, I'll just say that I received an email the next morning with the subject "Bricked my router..." and leave you to draw your own conclusions.
We looked at it a bit over lunch, and discovered it wasn't entirely bricked. On power-up, it would respond to pings for a short space of time, about five seconds or so. This is when the bootloader runs, just before it loads and jumps to the firmware image. During this short space of time, the router's TFTP server runs, waiting for a firmware download.
We ran a repeating ping in one command prompt window, and had the tftp client all ready to download a firmware image in another. We powered up the router, and when we saw the ping succeed, quickly hit Enter in the tftp window.
This allowed us to get back to the original Linksys firmware... we had to use an early version though, as the latest wouldn't take--we also had to switch his NIC to half-duplex and 10Mbps. After the upgrade, we used the web client to upgrade it to the latest Linksys firmware, and we were back to a safe place. Phew.
We tried a number of times after that to upgrade it to the DD-WRT firmware, without success, both from the web client and the tftp client. We just kept bricking it, even when we left it for five minutes after the download. Strange.
On the weekend, zar' did a little bit of investigation, and found out that the v1's CPU runs at only 125MHz, which means it's significantly slower than later versions, which run at 200Mhz. He speculated, and I agree, that this lower CPU speed almost certainly means a lower external bus speed. So he reflashed again with DD-WRT, and left the router sitting there for half an hour. And guess what? He now has a working WRT54G v1 running the DD-WRT firmware.
The moral of the story? I'm not sure there is one, but I guess it would be to check your hardware before upgrading, and make sure you understand what you've got.
And before you ask, yes, a computer engineer and a computer scientist should have known better.
Showing posts with label wrt54g. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wrt54g. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
A flash of routery goodness...
On vacation. That's the answer to a question nobody asked ("Where have you been?"). I'm back to work this week after two weeks of blissful hanging around the house.
The Aged Ps paid a visit from Edmonton (well, from St. Albert to be precise).
We had a good time. Dad helped me install some stair stringers and a patio stone landing area out the back door, so we now have back yard access without having to do the dash around from the front.
We also took some time to visit the zoo with the kids, which they really enjoyed.
The other thing of note I did over the holidays was pick up a Linksys WRT54G to replace my aging BEFW11S4. Now that I'm using the laptop a lot, 11Mb wireless just doesn't cut it for internal transfers.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a WRT54GL, which runs Linux, so had to settle for the poorly performing WRT54G v6.
But in a case of really fortuitous timing, it turns out that you can upgrade the WRT54G to run Linux. I followed the instructions, and everything worked perfectly, apart from a hole in the instructions--at the last step, when you're running the TFTP client on your PC and about to put the DD-WRT firmware on there, you have to remember to give your PC a static IP, or it won't be able to find the router, as the router is no longer servicing DHCP requests.
I rebooted with the new firmware, rubbing my hands together in glee. Wireless worked, wired worked, all was good. Then I went to set the WAN connection information on the router. Hmmm. Three WAN choices. Static IP. Automatic. Or Disabled. Where's PPPoE? Hey! I need that!
So here I was at the end of a one-way street, download-wise, with no way to go back to the VxWorks firmware, and no Internet connection to go look into this problem. No worries. I plugged my BEFW11S4 back in, surfed back to the DD-WRT site and poked around. It turns out that the unstable, alpha releases do have PPPoE support. So I downloaded that, flashed it in, and everything worked--or did, once I remembered that MTS insist on you using user@hostname as the PPPoE user name.
So now everything's back up and running with DD-WRT and life is sweet--I had noticed, since getting the WRT54G that DNS lookups were taking a lot longer... well, they're back to quick and zippy now. And let's be honest, I love having a router you can telnet into and get a shell prompt.
The Aged Ps paid a visit from Edmonton (well, from St. Albert to be precise).
We had a good time. Dad helped me install some stair stringers and a patio stone landing area out the back door, so we now have back yard access without having to do the dash around from the front.
We also took some time to visit the zoo with the kids, which they really enjoyed.
The other thing of note I did over the holidays was pick up a Linksys WRT54G to replace my aging BEFW11S4. Now that I'm using the laptop a lot, 11Mb wireless just doesn't cut it for internal transfers.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a WRT54GL, which runs Linux, so had to settle for the poorly performing WRT54G v6.
But in a case of really fortuitous timing, it turns out that you can upgrade the WRT54G to run Linux. I followed the instructions, and everything worked perfectly, apart from a hole in the instructions--at the last step, when you're running the TFTP client on your PC and about to put the DD-WRT firmware on there, you have to remember to give your PC a static IP, or it won't be able to find the router, as the router is no longer servicing DHCP requests.
I rebooted with the new firmware, rubbing my hands together in glee. Wireless worked, wired worked, all was good. Then I went to set the WAN connection information on the router. Hmmm. Three WAN choices. Static IP. Automatic. Or Disabled. Where's PPPoE? Hey! I need that!
So here I was at the end of a one-way street, download-wise, with no way to go back to the VxWorks firmware, and no Internet connection to go look into this problem. No worries. I plugged my BEFW11S4 back in, surfed back to the DD-WRT site and poked around. It turns out that the unstable, alpha releases do have PPPoE support. So I downloaded that, flashed it in, and everything worked--or did, once I remembered that MTS insist on you using user@hostname as the PPPoE user name.
So now everything's back up and running with DD-WRT and life is sweet--I had noticed, since getting the WRT54G that DNS lookups were taking a lot longer... well, they're back to quick and zippy now. And let's be honest, I love having a router you can telnet into and get a shell prompt.
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