[RndTbl] WRT54G V5 "fun-ness"

[Dan Keizer]

While there doesn't appear to be alot of local activity on these
items, I thought I'd pass along my latest notes on this ...

I have quite a few of these routers (for play mostly, some ran
asterisk) and at one point early this year (late last year?) I had
thrown on a whack-job of a firmware image that made the device
inoperable -- not that this was an expensive router (v5 with only
limited ram) it did have some usefulness ...
so, since I had a little bit of time and this baby was sitting in the
closer for quite a while, I went back to it ... wouldn't accept any
firmware's thrown at it at all for some reason -- since I didn't have
a jtag hanging around, (not that I could find it even if I tried) I
tried the ol' "fry-the-flash" trick (shorting pins 15 and 16 together
on the flash chip) ... (You *really* have to have a magnifying glass
to see each of those pins!) ... so, fry they go and reboot and voila
-- and re-send the fresh new better improved firmware for dd-wrt
(micro) onto it and it takes it .. wait a few minutes and it's back in
normal operation again :-)  happy days.

While this is still quite a useful gadget -- I can turn off the router
functionality and merge it's port with the other 4 ports of the switch
to get an extra port!  (That I like -- I really need a bigger switch)

The usual cautions -- opening and every shorting your circuits will
void anything you have for a warranty if you really care ... and you
really can do this with a jtag ... probably safer too.  ;-)

I still have one netgear router to fix up from a bad openwrt firmware
image ... will see how long this one takes ...

Dan.