I have been trying to get a better signal from my WRT54G in the office
to my lounge (through several walls and doors). I upgraded the
firmware to the third party Alchemy rc6 which improved things a lot as
I was able to increase the power to transmit, however it kept dropping
out which was annoying. So I decided to go back to the last good
Linksys firmware. I flashed this.....and it is then that I had the
problem.

Nothing worked, so powered down and up again (waiting the customary
30secs, still not altogether sure why I do this) and the dreaded
flashing diag light happened. I looked this up and discovered that the
most likely reason is corrupt firmware....ooops!

So I went to try and access 192.168.1.1 but no joy just a long wait
and then an error page, no password request. Tried resetting...no joy.
Tried connecting with just a hard line at 10mbs Half Duplex etc. etc.
but still no joy. No ping being received or returned.

So the WRT54G is now officially a brick....except...the wireless from
the lounge still works. I cannot change any settings (as I cannot get
access to 192.168.1.1) but it connects to my modem and allows access
to the internet. The flashing diag light goes out after about 5 secs
of booting the WRT54G up.

I have got details of how I can "de-brick" the linksys by shorting
across pins 15 and 16 of the Intel chip inside the brick. But I am
loathed to try this whilst it still (kind of) works.

Does anyone have any advice?

I can of course just go and replace the brick for £50 but I would like
to sort this one out if i can.

Matt. Davies

Matt. Davies wrote:
Show quoteHide quoteDid you have WRT54G set for DHCP,its possible that this facility has
been corrupted,Try setting your computer to a Static address
e.g.192.168.1.2 and then retry.

This may be too obvious but did you try depressing the reset switch for 5
seconds?

Dave G

Show quoteHide quote

Also try unplugging it and holding in reset when you plug it in.  Keep it
held in for 40 seconds.
Show quoteHide quote

IIRC, that's the D-Link firmware recovery procedure, never heard of it
working on a Linksys...

Matt. Davies <m***@starskill.com> wrote:
http://openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Troubleshooting
    Recovering from bad firmware
        Shorting Pins Method

or maybe
http://www.linksysinfo.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=3188


---
Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley (Lake County) CA USA  38.8,-122.5

Thank you all for your replies.

I have now managed to flash the WRT54G with a firmware using TFTP at
boot time. But I still cannot access the menus on http://192.168.1.1
so I cannot change any of the settings.

I'm still pretty much where I was. The diag light flashes rapidly at
start up then goes steady then goes off then flashes slowly then goes
off after about 30 secs.

I am planning on trying a few more firmwares, as I now have a way of
getting them on. Hopefully, one of them will allow me access to the
menus, and I can set it up again.

Not totally de-bricked yet...but 1 stage closer.

Matt.



Show quoteHide quote

m***@starskill.com (Matt. Davies) wrote:
It appears your WRT54G is working quite normally!  But you are
being bit by DHCP.

When initially fired up with the default firmware (and I assume
this is probably true with virtually all of the third party
firmware packages), the WRT54G has DHCP active and assigns IP
addresses beginning at 192.168.1.100.  What may or may not be
different with third party firmware, and what is eating your
lunch, is that it also *only* *routes* to the ethernet LAN ports
for those addresses.  If your host has an IP address of
192.168.0.10, for example, the WRT54G simply will not talk to
it.

The instructions that come with it, if followed exactly and if
and only if there is nothing different about your network than
what their setup configuration works with, will work just fine.
Of course if there is anything different...  what you have is
exactly the results.  (I know this from having had the same
experience before I figured out what was going on inside the
WRT54G.  I took it back to where I bought it, and said the LAN
ports don't work.  The guy hooked it to his own laptop, and it
did work.  The lights blinked on in my head, and I took it back
home...  I have no idea if that guy ever did figure out what was
going on.)

Hence, if you are *not* assigning your ethernet port address via
DHCP from the WRT54G *and* your ethernet port is not otherwise
within the range of 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.149 (I'm not sure
that is exactly the range...  it might be 100 addresses), then
you *can't* access the web server.

The trick is, of course, to use an ethernet port with an IP
address within that range to initially access the WRT54G.  There
are several ways of doing that, and I'm not familiar with any of
them that are not Linux based, so you are on your own there.
With Linux it is easy to assign multiple IP addresses to the
same NIC, so a command something like this works great:

    ifconfig eth0:1 192.168.1.100

It makes no difference what IP address was already configured
for eth0, it now has another one too.  (And that will also
automatically enter a route for the 192.168.1.0 subnet, so if
that isn't appropriate it has to be changed.)

I'd expect Windows of whatever variety has similar capability?

The other possible solution is to use a laptop (actually, any
box) that is configured to get an IP address via DHCP, and boot
it up with the ethernet port patched to a LAN port on the
WRT54G.  That should result in a correct IP address assignment.

One other problem you may or may not experience while diddling
with the configuration of a WRT54G is caching in the browser.
I've found different problems using different browsers, so
exactly what you might see depends on what you have.  Typically
setting some of the network configuration options (IP address,
password, maybe others) causes the browser to be unable to access
the WRT54G.  It is pulling up an old page from cache, and then
can't update it because it has the wrong configuration.
Restarting the browser should correct that.  (Hence, uploading
new firmware might also require restarting your browser.)

Likewise, when you do a firmware upgrade, don't just load it and
start configuring.  Do a manual reset (holding the button in for
7-10 seconds, until all the lights start blinking) *before* you
load the new firmware *and* do it again immediately after you
load the new firmware.

On 9 Mar 2005 00:29:33 -0800, m***@starskill.com (Matt. Davies) wrote:

I recovered a WRT54Gv1.1 from the same problem.  Local hot spot
operator tried to do a flash upgrade over the wireless despite a very
large message that appeared on the screen demanding that this not be
attempted.  Now, he knows better.  Shorting 15 and 16 got me into the
"failsafe" mode and I was able to use tftp to do a flash replacement.
  http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net:81/redhat/wrt54g_revival.html
Finding pins 15 and 16 were the major challenge.

Download any tftp server from:
  http://www.weird-solutions.com/download/demo.html
See "TFTP Desktop" near the bottom of the page.

Point it at 192.168.1.1.  You may need to tinker with the password.
Try (blank), admin, password, and whatever you had it set for before
you trashed it.  Point it at the *.bin flash image file.  If it
uploads, you win.  Then, do the grand reset.  I usually hold the
button for a full minute.  That's probably overkill, but that's what
it takes with a BEFSR41 so I suspect the WRT54G might be similar.

Thanks to everyone.

I set my IP address on the hardwired system to 192.168.1.2.

Pinged 192.168.1.1 using -t and reset the WRT54G which allowed me to
see that it received pings for a few seconds as it booted up. Due to
Boot_wait being enabled.

I then opened a new command window and set up the following
instruction ready to press :

tftp -i 192.168.1.1 put c:\code.bin

Where c:\code.bin was a renamed firmware that i had previously
downloaded.

I reset the WRT54G and then ran across the room to my system and
waited for pings to be received....and hit return to send my tftp
request.

Success! The bin uploaded successfully...hooray!

I reset the WRT54G only to find that the diag light still flashed and
192.168.1.1 was still not available. Tried powering off for a couple
of minutes, reset button for 30 seconds, powering on with reset held
in, turning round three times and throwing salt over my left
shoulder....but nothing worked.

So I went back to the drawing board.

What could be causing this?

I remembered reading somewhere that the firmware should be less than
3mb. On inspection I found that both of the firmwares I had
downloaded, the latest Linksys (ver 3) and the Alchemy rc6 were both
over 3mb.

I went to www.linksysinfo.org and downloaded Satori v4 which is less
than 3mb, tried the above again....and a fully de-bricked WRT54G!!!!

I now just have to remember all those port addresses to set it up
properly again...oh well better than buying a new one.

Thanks again to everyone.

Matt.

Matt. Davies wrote:

Just out of curiosity, I have been going to the manufacturer site at
www.linksys.com and downloading installing v 3.03.6 which is 3.19 Megabytes.

Did you ever try the ones from the manufacturer (www.linksys.com) or just
the ones from the info group (www.linksysinfo.org)?

m***@starskill.com (Matt. Davies) wrote:
And *that* is your problem.  The stock firmware by default will
*not* route to 192.168.1.2.  It comes up using DHCP with a range
of addresses from 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.150, and it will
*only* route to those addresses.

That has nothing to do with the size of the firmware load.  The
stock firmware, that you overwrote, was also just over 3Mb is size.

The difference is that the Satori firmware will route to any
192.168.1.0 address by default.  (It might route to any 192.168.0.0
address too, I don't remember.)

Floyd L. Davidson wrote:
The linksys limits the pool of DHCP assigned addresses to 192.168.1.100
and above with a 24 bit netmask... as long as you are on the class C (
or cidr block of /24) of 192.168.1.0, you are "directly connected" and
there is no routing involved.  Unless Linksys totally derived their own
IP protocol stack any device with an address of 192.168.1.0/24 on a
directly connected port (wireless or hard) can communicate.  Only
routing is going is between the Wan port and the "local" ports.

Some previous quoted text deleted.
Show quoteHide quote

Show quote Hide quote Wrong.  It's a range of 50 addresses (I got the upper limit off
by one above, it's 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.149), and you have
the ability to configure it to any specific range.

Wrong.  You are directly connected to nothing.  It runs Linux,
and just as with any Linux system it requires a route to the
interface.

I haven't looked into specifically what it is doing.  The *fact*
is, you *can't* talk to a WRT54G with stock software after a
reset if your IP address is not in the range that it serves from
its DHCP server.

If you don't think that is possible, just get yourself a WRT54G
and try it!

And *that* is indeed true too.

Who else makes firmware hacks -- and for what other routers?

Show quoteHide quote

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 07:22:04 -0600, "JB"
<jbrandonbbrem***@hotmail.com> wrote:

WAP54G
  http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/WAP54G

WRT54G
  http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/LinksysWrt54g

The groups providing alternatives firmware are listed in the
respective indexes.  Note on other devices appear in links at the top
of the page.

Are there hacks for other routers besides Linksys?

Show quoteHide quote

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 12:40:10 -0600, "JB"
<jbrandonbbrem***@hotmail.com> wrote:

Show quoteHide quoteThe Broadcom chipset and reference design used by Linksys is also used
by quite a list of other vendors.  See:
  http://www.sveasoft.com/modules/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3653

There were also some hacks for using the DWL-900AP+ firmware on a
WAP11.  I don't know the details.

VLAN & SSID
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Restricting wireless networks a laptop can access
File Sharing Problem
will "enhanced" 802.11g devices help interference?
Animated tool for Wi-Fi?
HSB1 -AP Hawking Range Extender-Anyone try one? (versus Lnksys)
Linksys compability w/ HyperWRT
Linksys notebook adapter and Win98SE