I Think I May Have Killed My Router

[Brando569]

I have a Linksys WRT54G (Firmware Version: v4.71.1, Hyperwrt 2.1b1 + Thibor15c) that i brought up to school with me a few days ago and i just tried to set everything up security wise so only my roommates and i have access to the router, everything was going fine so i figured i would save the config in case i messed something up.

i backed it up to my computer and about a minute or two later i couldnt access any websites. thinking that maybe the internet was down i connected to it directly and everything worked fine, so i reconnected to the router and still nothing. i tried a few things and nothing worked so i figured i would go back to the default config. i selected the option "clear NVRAM and use default settings" and everything went fine, that is until i tried to save any changes i made. i was able to access the pages but once i hit the save button it would say the connection was reset. so im pretty much screwed out of using the web interface, i tried a hard reset (holding down the reset button), disconnecting the power for about 10 minutes, trying different ethernet ports for the uplink and nothing seems to work. im at a loss here...

[jcarle]

Upgrade to Tomato firmware, you'll have less problems.

[puntoMX]

I don’t know the age of your router, but if it’s within a year I would first upgrade to a newer LinkSYS firmware before VOIDING your warranty by installing a 3rd party firmware.

EDIT: Tomato Version 1.17 came out yesterday .

[rendrag]

so right now, what do you have? do you have a web interface and no internet, or do you have no interface and no internet?

if you have an interface, upgrade to linksys firmware first, then if you want, upgrade to dd-wrt (many people's choice) or tomato (many other people's choice).

If you have no interface and no internet, did you do the reset where you hold the reset button in for 30s w/ the power cord disconnected?

[Brando569]

the router is a few years old, currently i have a web interface and no internet. everytime i try to change settings (save settings, upgrade firmware [i havent tried this yet but im assuming it will be the same], restore config files, etc...) it says the connection was reset (also when it tried to use the apply.cgi script it just displays a blank screen instead of "changes saved"), although i can access the web interface pages. ill try and upgrade the firmware and see if it does the same thing.

[Brando569]

when i try to upgrade it (click the upgrade button) it says the connection was reset by the server but if i hit the back button it tries to upload it and the first time i did it, it said the connection timed out and the upgrade failed. i tried it again but didnt have time to watch it since i had to come here to work.

[rendrag]

what are you flashing to? you may have to do the full reset again, then try to flash the firmware

[Brando569]

im flashing from thibor to tomato v1.17 and what do you mean buy full reset? i held the reset button for 30 seconds and that didnt seem to do much

*edit*

i just tried flashing from thibor to the linksys firmware and it still said the same thing

Edited February 28, 2008 by Brando569

[rendrag]

when i've run into probs on my v4 router, usually holding in the reset button for 30s "fixes" whatever i broke.

in any event, hopefully someone else has an idea. my next step would probably try to upgrade directly to linksys firmware. if you can get that installed, then i'd try flashing to tomato. going from 1 3rd party firmware to another has never really sat well w/ me.

[Brando569]

read above, i just tried that and it didnt work

[rendrag]

You've successfully flashed firmware from linksys to hyper-wrt, so I'm sure you know what the process entails. i guess it's possible the router has been bricked.

http://www.barik.net/archive/2004/12/03/220751/

http://www.thenorth.com/apblog4.nsf/0/668D...52570A400535F16

http://www.google.com/search?q=unbrick+lin...lient=firefox-a

[Brando569]

ok so ive successfully de-bricked the router but im having problems sending the firmware over. i cant get a connection going between the router and my computer. i have two interfaces on my computer and im a little confused on how to connect them correctly. im fairly adept at using linux, my installation is kubuntu 7.11, i issued the command /sbin/ifconfig eth0:1 192.168.0.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 and that went as planned.

if i connect one from the pc to the drop box (i live in a university dorm) tftp will send packets, if i make the connection between the router and the pc tftp wont send packets because it says that it cant access the network. if i connect eth0 to the dropbox (from the pc) and eth1 to the router (from the pc) tftp will send the packets but i wont get any acks. if i connect eth0 to the router and then connect the wan port to the dropbox, tftp will send packets but i wont get any acks. ive tried to configure them manually but nothing seems to work. ifup/down keeps saying that it doesnt know what eth0 and eth1 are (Ignoring unknown interface eth0=eth0.), knetworkmanager says eth0 (it says its name is eth0:avahi, same thing for eth1, but yet only loopback is defined in the interfaces file) has my universities IP address but no subnet mask and in kinfocenter eth0 shows a private address (168.254.7.2) and eth1 will pop up sometimes with another private address. im at a loss right now....

*edit*

i just tried it again and all seemed to go well at first. i opened up kinfocenter and saw that i had a working ip again (i could connect to the internet) so i issued /sbin/ifconfig eth0:1 192.168.1.4 netmask 255.255.255.0 and then checked kinfocenter again. eth0 was listed with the working ip address and eth0:1 was listed with 192.168.1.4. so i disconnected from the dropbox and connected to the router and tried to send it..... nothing, connection timed out. i checked kinfocenter and everything was changed, eth0 and eth0:1 were no longer listed instead i had eth0:avahi with an ip of 168.254.7.2 and a subnet of 255.255.0.0 ! now im completely baffled.

Edited February 28, 2008 by Brando569

[rendrag]

i'm not super good at linux, but i'm pretty certain that if you're getting a 168.254.7.2 IP, that means the DHCP request from your network card is timing out.

Really stupid question: When you're connecting to the router, you're going from a NIC on your PC to one of the 4 LAN ports on the back of the router, correct? You're not plugging into the WAN port, are you? The WAN port should be empty until you get working firmware on the device.

[Brando569]

yep im going from the nic to the lan port2, i posted this over on the ubuntu forums since i figured 100,000 linux geeks would be able to help me better then 100,000 microsoft geeks