Linksys WRT54G now a brick....but wireless works...

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

Reply to
Matt. Davies
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Did 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.

Reply to
Ted

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.
Reply to
Floyd L. Davidson

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.

Reply to
Matt. Davies

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

Dave G

Reply to
Dave G

Reply to
Tom Scales

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

Reply to
William P.N. Smith

formatting link
Recovering from bad firmware Shorting Pins Method

or maybe

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Reply to
dold

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.

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pins 15 and 16 were the major challenge.

Download any tftp server from:

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"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.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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

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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.

Reply to
Matt. Davies

Just out of curiosity, I have been going to the manufacturer site at

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and downloading installing v 3.03.6 which is 3.19 Megabytes.

Did you ever try the ones from the manufacturer

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or just the ones from the info group
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Reply to
Peter Pan

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.)
Reply to
Floyd L. Davidson

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

Reply to
JB

WAP54G

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WRT54G
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The groups providing alternatives firmware are listed in the respective indexes. Note on other devices appear in links at the top of the page.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Are there hacks for other routers besides Linksys?

Reply to
JB

The Broadcom chipset and reference design used by Linksys is also used by quite a list of other vendors. See:

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

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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.

Reply to
jrhick

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.

Reply to
Floyd L. Davidson

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