![]() They were selling mostly NEC and Buffalo, but none of the models I found on the shelves appeared on the list of supported hardware. The Linksys WRT54G was the first router fitted with open source firmware, but Yamada Denki, the biggest electronics store in my part of town, does not sell any Linksys products. So I started doing a bit of research on OpenWRT and its cousin DD-WRT and what sort of routers that are compatible with them I could get locally here in Yokohama, Japan. So you can imagine that whatever router I’m using is always getting a good workout. Of the 8 PCs and Macs in my home and office that are sharing a cable internet connection, at least four are on all the time, crunching spam data received from around the world day and night. The router firmware obviously had trouble tracking which entries in its Network Address Translation (NAT) table could be discarded and the table would overflow, making connections to the outside world hit and miss, as NAT entries are essential for replies to requests sent to servers out there to get back into the LAN. When I investigated I noticed that the internal log of the NEC WarpStar was full of error messages like these:Ĥ 18:09:29 NAT TX-ERROR List Create Error : UDP 192.168.1.102 : 31320 > 201.29.227.157 : 7701 (IP-PORT=1)Ĥ 18:09:29 NAT TX-ERROR List Create Error : UDP 192.168.1.102 : 31320 > 99.227.142.5 : 9205 (IP-PORT=1)Ī router reset (briefly pulling the power cord) would cure it for a few hours to two days at most, but then the problem always came back. When I clicked on links in the browser, either it was very slow or it returned an error or timed out on me. Ī few weeks ago I started having random problems connecting to the internet. Months ago a friend had recommended OpenWRT, another open source solution for low cost broadband routers, but following the old “don’t try to fix it if it ain’t broken” mantra, I had stuck with my standard NEC Aterm WR6650S WarpStar router (firmware revision 8.72). I’m very impressed with its rich feature set and ease of installation. Note: (Thanks to Ronald’s Comment below) – You need to start the TFTP transfer within seconds after powering on the routerĪs soon as it completes the upload, the router automatically installs it and reboots, so give it plenty of time to do this (up to 5 minutes).Today I installed the open source router firmware DD-WRT on a newly purchased Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 broadband router. To my very pleasant surprise, this sorted out the problem and the old working dd-wrt firmware was successfully uploaded. I tried increasing the block size from the default 512 bytes to 8192 bytes and the timeout to 255 seconds for good measure. ![]() I put my firmware file and the tftp.exe file in the same folder, opened a command prompt and navigated to the folder containing tftp.exe and my default firmware. exe file that you can put in any folder and run from the command line. I downloaded the “WinAgents TFTP Client” from the download page and gave it a try. Fortunately the first line on that page “The standard TFTP command-line utility does not support some very important features like blocksize option” caught my attention. In my search to find a solution for this, I came across another TFTP client here. However, I was using the standard windows 7 TFTP client and the firmware transfer kept getting interrupted part way through. However, I couldn’t get the connectivity I required.įinally I realised that after a single 30 second reset (ie holding the hard reset button that you need a pin to access for 30 seconds), you could access the router via TFTP on the default IP address (192.168.1.1). There are various instructions on how to do a “30/30/30 reset” such as here. ![]() I tried various ways of trying to regain some control. It really was “bricked” (ie had the same functionality as a house brick). ![]() No connectivity to it was possible at all. It just rebooted itself over and over again every ten seconds or so. I installed this new firmware on my WNR2200, but unfortunately it rendered my router unbootable. I experimented with the firmware-mod-kit (see this page for info) and added a package to the distribution. I had successfully installed this software on my router, but still wanted to add some additional functionality. One is that you want to enable new functionality that isn’t supported in the default manufacturer’s firmware.Ī popular project that supplies advanced firmware for household routers is dd-wrt. There are various reasons for installing new firmware on an old router that you may have lying around.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |