Running commentary on Buffalo WHR-G54S

Look back on this NG few days. There is some related discussion. I originated the topic. I am using flashed Buffalo since Tuesday. I got it from Tigerdirect. I've been using Linksys but this high power router seems to give better signal strength. I have to cover 3 levels of floor in my house while router is located on the top floor. Tony

Tony, I am lazy, when I want to light up a device, I want to go to a place where the relevant info is collected. Nothing against newsgroups, but from experience, it's a crap shoot trying to find the desired information with just one search.

But having said that, I did surf the groups for hours looking for the varied WRT flashes and gotchas.

I will be going back and reviewing your posts. Unfortunately, a LOT of the Buffalo WHR-G54S posts go like this: "I bought a WHR-G54S, flashed it with DD-WRT and it's great". The WIKI stuff is good, but it missed some of the finer points that I asked about (where is TFTP, which BIN)

Not saying that the WHR-G54S isn't a good thing, but let's be a little more precise. As I am trampled by the Buffalo Stampede, I will be adding to my collection of factoids. It may be common knowledge, but where is that common knowledge derived from?

To show that I do know how to tread the boards, you can look up the "Ardent Tool of Capitalism" and f> Louis Ohland wrote:

Louis Ohland hath wroth:

Good idea. I do the same thing. Some random comments:

1. More photos please, especially in the disassembly section.
2. Lose the gigantic white space on both margins. It's a huge waste of paper when printed. It's not a newspaper column. Incidentally, that's the origin of the term "narrow minded".
3. Add FCC ID link (because the FCCID search engine is permanently broken and never seems to find anything): WHR-HP-G54 FCC ID: FDI-09101577-0

I don't have the FCC ID's for the other similar models.

If you want to list ALL the various Buffalo products, go to:

Inscribe "FDI" into the "Grantee Code" box. Change the "Show XX records" at the bottom of the page to 100. Hit "Start Search". 52 products (and changes).

1. Include details on the power source (wall wart) including the connector for those that lose theirs. My WHR-HP-G54 uses a 5.0VDC

2.6A wall wart but the label on the bottom shows 5.0VDC 0.9A which is apparently the current consumption. Nice. 2.1/5.5mm ??? connector.

1. Add the first 6 octets of the MAC address so that war drivers will be able to identify the type of access point. Mine shows: 00:16:01:xx:xx:xx
2. Explain differences between similar models: WHR-HP-G54 High Power Turbo-G 802.11b/g WHR-G54S Low power No Turbo-G 802.11b/g WHR-HP-AG108 High Power Turbo-G 802.11a/b/g Also add links to the models on Buffalo web pile.
3. I probably shouldn't mention that I have several boxes of assorted MCA boards in storage doing nothing.

I settled on a 600 pixel wide format years ago. It comes out better on older IBM monitors (the glorious 85xx series). As Forrest Gump might say, no particular reason.

I've no decent digital camera. Was looking at Best Buy for one. The SLR looking models are cheesy plastic, the metal cased ones like the Casio Exilim are neat-o, but only 3x optical zoom. I wondered if a digi-cam would work.

Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Louis Ohland hath wroth:

That's fine. I can still read it on the screen. However, you must realize that the worlds supply of white space is limited and that we may eventually run out.

Also, please note that the original purpose of HTML was to be viewable on any monitor and any computah. That lasted until the invention of "publishing" in HTML which demanded that users purchase the correct size display to view the web pages. The Mozilla 4.79 Composer you used to create the pages can easily autosize the screen if you NOT put the entire web page into a table and get rid of the: line. It will still look good at 640x480 and not waste screen area on more modern displays.

I have 4 cameras. All are somewhat of a compromise and take generally lousy closeups. The camera in my cell phone is the worst. If you decide to buy something, be sure to test it for depth of field (i.e. focus) for closup shots or your photos of the guts of wireless devices will look like mine. 3x is not much of a limitation when you can have 8Mpixel images. These can be enlarged with Photoshop or Irfanview and still look quite sharp. Also, anything over about 3X will require some form of tripod or image stabilizer.

I just flashed a WHR-HP-G54 with DD-WRT v23 SP2 generic. It did not go exactly as the instructions on the DD-WRT web pile.

1. When starting the tftp upload, hitting the enter key to start tftp immediately after applying power to the WHR-HP-G54 did not work. It ended up with a timeout error 3 times out of 3 tries. What does work is to wait until the bright red light on the front panel lights up (exactly 3 seconds after applying power) and then hit the enter key.
2. The instructions say something about all the lights coming on at once. That never happened. What did happen after the successful upload was that the bright red (diag?) light started flashing and continued to flash for about 90 seconds. When it went out, the router was ready to use. I suspect doing anything while it was flashing would be considered a bad idea.
3. The new unit comes with a piece of clear plastic tape over the front display area. However, the tape also covers the AOSS button on the top of the unit which was partially depressed by the tape. I couldn't figure out why the router was going into AOSS handshake mode without provocation until I noticed the problem with the tape. Remove tape before operating.

On Sat, 25 Nov 2006 20:25:50 -0800, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

Amen! Second the motion!

I highly recommend the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5 (or current -FZ7). Readily available on eBay at bargain prices. Awesome fast Leica super-zoom (12x) stabilized lens. Very well engineered and made. Get as close to your subject as 5 cm at wide-angle and 1 m at the telephoto end in macro mode, with minimum area of only 1.59 x 1.20 inches (40 x 30 millimeters). See and .

Depth of field is an issue in macro mode with any camera.

Depends on shutter speed -- longer lenses work well without stabilization or a tripod when there is sufficient light for an appropriate shutter speed.

I also changed the PDF versi> Re-writing the flash instructions, based on the enter after port LEDs

What good is the FCCID? Will it help us determine differences?

All in time.

I though wardriving was a bad thing.

Eh, what good is this? I did find the base hardware configs for them on OpenWrt

>< this is for devices starting with serial 3407:

Bootloader: CFE System-On-Chip: Broadcom 5352 CPU Speed: 200 Mhz Flash size: 4 MB RAM: 16 MB Wireless: integrated Broadcom BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller Ethernet: ? Serial: yes HMM, remember the two sets of solderpads on the PCB? JTAG: yes

I have the Elysian Fields of Microchannel waiting for them. I've been assembling a Warp 4 machine with ActionMedia 2 capture card, Fast/Wide,

4.5GB drive, 128MB ECC, M-ACPA, PCMCIA/A, and play around with video.

Though if I could ever find someone that knows how to use Person to Person (IBM style) that would be interesting.

>

Louis Ohland hath wroth:

Why are you converting a Wiki into a PDF in the first place? I can see doing that to static web pages for archival purposes, but not a dynamic wiki that can change daily. As for looking awful, images should not be resized by the browser. They will always look awful if you do that. Pre-size the images correctly for the page layout instead.

Incidentally, I use CutePDF and PDF995 for butchering PDF's.

Louis Ohland hath wroth:

Much better. The worlds supply of white space is safe, for now.

You're not using full screen. If you resize the browser window, the web page will magically re-arrange itself to be readable in the window. Try it. Works with any size screen, any size window, any browser, and any page layout program. That's the way it was intended to work, not as some type of static desktop publishing medium.

Louis Ohland hath wroth:

Have you looked at what is on the FCC ID web pile? For me, it includes original manufactory, test results, inside photos, some history, and a bunch of other numbers I find interesting.

Ever notice how additions to web pages arrive faster than modifications can be made?

That depends on who is doing the wardriving. I've been doing it somehwat like marketing research, where I'm interested in what products are being sold and used locally. It's like saying that speeding is a bad thing. However, we still purchase vehicles that can go faster than the speed limit.

The above 3 models look very similar and logic would suggest require similar proceedures to flash. There's no guarantee everyone will purchase the exact model that you're using for your walk through.

Overkill. Just the Buffalo products please.

This is stone age MCA junk mostly extracted from Model 50-95 servers. I've been saving the boards for the requisite burnt offerings. I'll dig out the boxes, take some photos, and you see what looks interesting. I was going to sell them on eBay, but looking at the past auction, MCA doesn't sell well.

Not me. I gave up on IBM after wasteing huge amounts of time and money on one of their dealer training programs, only to get screwed in the end.

Well..yeah, but the hole in the ozone layer is gittin' bigger!

My intent is to put the instructions into a viewer neutral form so it can be printed easily without a browser reformatting it.

I could just eliminate the WIKI stuff and put it in my words, just credit the sources. The issue with WIKI is that it is just as good as the last editor.

Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Dealing with mature equipment brings humility. I still feel OK at the command line, so TFTP wasn't scary. Old home week.

The WHR-G54S has 4MB flash and 16 MB RAM, I play with systems that have

128K of ROM and 8MB of RAM. Nothing out of place.

Ebuy is an odd place. It depends on how the item is titled and described. Some cards are "enhanced uselessness" devices and have little cache (3270, 5250, HIPPI, dual async).

Card names are pretty much all I need. For something odd/rare, I'll ask for a picture.

I just shake my head and drawl "it ain't r-a-a-h-h-t". Bad marketing, internal conflicts between divisions, and a desire to control the hardware. Dealer training program for what? Personal Systems? Business Systems?

On Sun, 26 Nov 2006 14:47:51 -0600, Louis Ohland wrote in :

That works _without_ setting narrow limits -- it's properly controlled by the printing browser, not the website.

But much easier to edit, and contributions can be valuable. Depending on the software, you may also be able to control who can and who cannot edit. See wikis below for a good example that's working.

Also, please don't switch posting styles (top vs bottom) in mid-thread

-- it's confusing. Thanks.

On Sun, 26 Nov 2006 10:17:31 -0800, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

If your images are large, and the full resolution is important, consider using large thumbnails in your document that can click through to the full resolution image. That speeds page loading time without compromising image quality. See how that works at .

On Sun, 26 Nov 2006 10:35:11 -0800, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

Not a great analogy. There's nothing wrong with a Wi-Fi survey. What's wrong is making unauthorized use of a Wi-Fi network.

Especially as the page ages and you lose interest in maintaining it. ;) One of the big advantages of a wiki on a public wiki space (e.g., Wikia) is that maintenance can continue after the originator loses interest.