My new WHR-HP-G54 are burned in for ~ 2 weeks

My new WHR-HP-G54s have burned in for ~ 2 weeks and seem to be working without problems.

I've been all over the DD-WRT and wiki site trying to figure out how to do the deed of safely installing the correct DD-WRT software in the first of these with out building a yellow brick road.

I'm quite confused by the acronyms, buzz words and cross references to other protocols and documents.

So far I've come to the conclusion I need dd-wrt.v23_sp2_standard.zip

The first application will be as an wireless AP and wire 4 port router. (only 2 or 3 ports will likely ever be used).

The second application will be as a client/router with four ports (I'm assuming this is possible/practical).

Once I manage to gain a (very) fundamental understanding of these two options I'm planning on playing other games just to see what these toys can do.

I'm at a total loss on how to proceed and would appreciate any and all information/links on how to get from point A to point B. Nice if I had a dummy's list of all important stopping points on the way as well as what other hardware I should consider for the process.

My OS are XP and Mac OS10.2 (for reasons of family harmony I prefer to avoid using the OS 10)

TIA

Reply to
NotMe
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Just got mine up and working, too. I'm using it as an AP to an existing LAN (my mom's broadband next door). I ran the cat 5 and then used the air station to make an AP. Works good. I too, need the info on how to upgrade. Maybe Jeff will respond.

Reply to
Travis McGee

Our eternal flame at the temple only burned for 8 days on Hannukah. What's your secret?

Bah. It's very easy, but you gotta have rhythm. The only cerimony that works the first time is TFTP. Here are the exact instructions for doing it under Windoze. Read carefully:

The only trick is knowing exactly when to hit after the tftp command problem. There's a narrow window between about 2-3 seconds after you apply power that's only about 2 seconds wide. Count to 3 slowly after applying power, and hit enter. If you get a weird error message, unplug the router, and try again with a slightly different delay. Whatever you do, don't abort in the middle of an upload.

I haven't tried the batch file trick, but it looks quite good and should work.

After you've successfully installed DD-WRT, subsequent updates can be easily done from the web based menu and do not require TFTP. Update also preserve the settings so you don't have to reload everything from scratch. Still, it's best to make backups of your settings just in case something goes wrong, goes wrong, goes wrong, goes wrong...

The only sure way I know how to "brick" it is to use the wrong version firmware. I suggest generic Broadcom v23 SP3 NoKaid (not standard), which is in the "beta" directory. This week, I've been using:

Dated 7/13/2007. Watch out for the directory dates as they're in European format. It's also easy to get mixed up in the mini, micro, standard, etc versions. You want an image that's 3.2Mbytes big.

I'm sympathetic. Wireless is like a loaf of bread. You eat it best in small bites. Try to eat the whole thing at once, and you'll choke.

Close. I prefer the bleeding edge which is SP3. You probably won't have any use for Kaid, which is a Xbox game server.

No problem. That's fairly basic.

Sure. Ports are easy. If you run out of ports, just add an ethernet switch. You can do some tricky routing and VLAN things with the ethernet ports on the DD-WRT router, but that will be later.

Well, Learn By Destroying(tm) is my motto. You haven't learned anything about routers until you've totally trashed one, and had to punch reset to recover, while the wife and kids are screaming at your to get it back online.

I guess just blunder your way through the Wiki at:

There's lots of good things under there. If there's something you find confusing, punch the buzzword into the search box and see what pops up.

Those exist and are called FAQ's. Methinks it would be best if you started at the top at:

and just went through the list of features to get familiar with the buzzwords. Then, the regular install and setup instructions should be more comprehensible.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I just want to reinforce what Jeff said. Use those links for flashing via tftp. I actually just copy and paste the command lines directly from the wiki into my command line window on XP.

Two comments-

- when you save the downloaded .bin image (dd-wrt.v23_sp2_standard is fine, you want the .bin version) save it directly to your C drive to make it easy for the tftp to find.

- Getting the timing right, as Jeff said, can be tricky, but the consequences of wrong timing are null. You can try again as many times as you want. The important thing is not to reboot the router prematurely once it takes the flash. Wait and wait. As long as you have seen a confirmation in the tftp dialog that the transfer took and as long as you wait a looong time (5 minutes?), then the risk seems to be very low.

Steve

Reply to
seaweedsteve

seaweedsteve hath wroth:

Argh. I forgot about that. Thanks.

When the flash upload is done and everything is allegedly working properly, it will display a button that says "restart". Do NOT punch the button with the mouse. Don't do anything with the router. Just walk away for at least 3 minutes. What happens is that there's something going on with the NVRAM flash after it's done uploading. I don't know what. Probably copying from RAM to flash. I've had flash image corruption after an upload if I hit the "restart" button too soon. It's probably only about 30-45 seconds, but it was much longer in the past, and I'm paranoid. The v23 SP3 flash screen now says "may take up to 300 seconds" or something similar.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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