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Old 05-14-2007, 02:18 PM   #1
des_a
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Linksys WRT300N Router - Who Can Do This For Me? Is This Even Valid?


First Read: http://forums.hardwarezone.com/showthread.php?t=1322409, http://www.macsat.com/macsat/content/view/20/30/, and http://readlist.com/lists/mythtv.org...s/7/36899.html.

First of all, is this even valid information? Could you really install this on the router? Would this be able to work by plugging the Internet port into a wirless bridge and that's how it accesses the Internet? Would it allow me to put one end on one subnet, and the other on another?

Second, which store can you buy this at? I mean, with the firmware already on it and everything. I don't want to risk installing the firmware wrong and immediately creating a brick. I'd need all this to make the comptuer system work.
 
Old 05-14-2007, 03:00 PM   #2
MS3FGX
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I am not sure what you are driving at with the question about this being factual information. Many, many, people are running third party firmwares on their Linksys routers. It isn't like this is just a one-off mention about it on a shady website.

Second, if you really want to connect your router to a wireless bridge and get an Internet connection that way, you can already do that with the stock firmware, nothing is going to stop you there. But installing a third party firmware would allow the router to act as a wireless bridge, or even let you setup a WDS. It would be a much cleaner solution.
 
Old 05-14-2007, 03:20 PM   #3
Matir
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I am running OpenWRT on my WRT54GL router. 3rd part firmwares do work, but I can't say anything about your specific model. OpenWRT is shown as "Work in Progress" on the WRT300N. More details can be seen here.

In other words, yes, you can run a 3rd party firmware. In my case, it's just a matter of uploading it through the standard web interface. Works perfectly.
 
Old 06-19-2007, 10:52 PM   #4
des_a
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Well, based off your input, I didn't get the WRT300N after all. Instead I got the WRTSL54GS router. I chose it because it was listed on the list of compatibillity and it had a USB port so I could install the packages I needed. I ordered it from Amazon.com.

Now, I can for sure say it works now. There was only one problem. When I flashed via the standard web interface, and it worked. I did this immediately, and it worked. An hour later, it quit working. The power button was blinking. After 2 hours on linksys tech support, there were no results.

Then, the next day, it let me reflash it with linksys's ftp utillity and it worked. It wouldn't reflash with the standard firmware, but it reflashed with OpenWRT firmware.

I thought I could at least configure it. But it only had wireless access. No more wired access. I couldn't reenable wired access, and didn't even know how. The reset button didn't work anymore either.

Plugging USB devices with LEDs into the USB port didn't work either. All it did was get the card reader to be plugged in. When I plug the card reader into a computer's USB port, the LED lights up, indicating that it's got power, regardless of whether or not anything is working driver wise.

As best as I can figure, either: A) I got a bad router when it came that was bound to fail, it was defective. B) I flashed it wrong. I'm new to flashing. The only thing I'd ever flashed in my life before was my new laptop, with an official BIOS upgrade that isn't appearently much better than the old one. No new features. Just a microcode fix. It worked. C) My roommate plugged in his computer while I was trying to configure the router. His was not configured for the router at that time. I was not in the middle of flashing, so it's not because of that.

I'm going to have to attempt to return the router via amazon and exchange it for another router. If they don't let me do that, and get a new router back that might not be defective, assumming that's the problem, then I'm just going to have to spend a second $100 dollars to get another one from them. Then do try number 2. Same model, same stuff, maybe one difference in trying to flash, but that's it. I just don't know whether that was it or not.

Shouldn't it either work or not work immediately after a flash? If it works, shouldn't it continue to work? It had a sort of strange delayed reaction, not immediate. I just don't know.

I must have a router that meets these standards though, because, yes, I need a router. Yes, I need a wireless router. But it needs to be able to do automatic, manual scheduled wake on LAN requests for my server. No router wants to do this itself, so I need the firmware. The router is significantly low power, I'm told. That's what I need. The computer needs to turn on multiple times per day, as scheduled.

Here comes what could end up being try number 2, for possibly $200 dollars total, just for the router...
 
Old 06-20-2007, 05:51 AM   #5
MS3FGX
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I am surprised Linksys tech support even spoke to you. Once you flash a third party firmware to your router, the warranty is obviously void. This means that returning the device to Linksys is likely not going to end well. If you do an advanced RMA and they send you a new one first, once they get your old one they are probably going to charge your credit card for the price of a new router.

As for the problem, I would say that it is 90% likely that you did something wrong, or at least something went wrong that was not immediately obvious. Flashing the router to a new firmware is not something to take lightly, I have done a few routers and even when everything went perfectly, the router would stop working for no apparent reason and took several reboots to get going. Let's not forget that this software is in no way shape or form guaranteed to be stable, or even work for that matter.

I doubt your router is completely dead. If you look online, there are about a dozen ways to resurrect a WRT54G-family router, everything from shorting pins on the motherboard to flashing the EEPROM with a JTAG cable. These may be outside of your capability though, in which case you might be able to find somebody local who has the electronic skills to complete the tasks (or at least sell it to that person).

Finally, unless you need a lot of packages, you shouldn't need a router with USB support. The internal flash can hold additional packages without the need to dump them to an external file system. Even if you did run out of flash storage, you can mount a shared file system from one of the computers on your network and install the packages to that (though that may or may not be practical for you).
 
Old 06-21-2007, 12:20 PM   #6
des_a
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Since I don't know the size of the packages I want to install, I probably do need the USB port. I know I couldn't mount a shared filesystem because the whole reason it has to be 3rd party firmware, is because without it, it can't wake up a computer. So the computer wouldn't nessassarily be on when the packages were needed.

By waking up a computer, we're not just talking about once a day, always at the same time, we're talking about possibly multiple times per day, and maybe at a different time each day.

The server, which is woken up, then does the same thing, but to the other computers. Only a single server is done by the router. I've looked, and there are only 2 ways to do this. Wake on LAN (router for low enough power), or wake on RTC. Wake on RTC only works once per day unless you use nvram-wakeup, a compatible motherboard, and programming that's beyond my current skills in these conditions. All that would be needed to just get it to work. I've already spent about a year off and on with this method.

The only other method is Wake on LAN. Wake on LAN can do it multiple times per day easily, when you've got crontab. The catch? Some other network device has to be up and running. We're doing this to save power, so another computer's out, as that would simply make the power go way up. It has to be very low power, such as a router.

There are some power strips I've heard of that make the power go on and off, but the power strips just do a hard off when it comes to a computer. It has to shut off properly first, for damage to be avoided.

Then when it comes on, the computer doesn't come on. Only the power strip comes on. And comming on may need to happen multiple times per day, at changing times.

For the rest of the router functions, which need to be done, any router works. And this does need to be done too.
 
  


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