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3rd party firmware killed my router
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Admin Emeritus
Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
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So, I have the venerable Linksys WRT54G (version 2), and after owning it for many months, with flawless performance, I decided to try some of the third-party firmwares that everyone seems to be so crazy about.
Well, first the installation didn't go smoothly -- it kept stalling during the upload, returning a failure error. In the end, I had to downgrade to Linksys firmware version 3.x before I could upload the Sveasoft firmware (I used the latest non-paid version). It proved to be unstable for me, and I didn't see any improvement in signal strength with power adjustments, so I reverted back to the latest Linksys firmware (4.2.7) -- but the instability hasn't gone away. In fact, it's gotten worse. Now it crashes and won't recover on its own. Even pulling the power doesn't help, it needs several minutes of weirdness (e.g. the wireless interface going up and down and up and down) before it eventually stabilizes and works for another while. The period between crashing is going down -- it just crashed while posting this message, which itself is a response to it crashing 10 minutes ago.
So, besides making good on my threats and ditching this consumer trash for an Apple AirPort Extreme base station, does anyone have any suggestions? I have already tried:
-doing a factory reset and re-entering my config
-re-flashing with the current firmware (4.2.7)
-downgrading to 4.2.6
I'm stumped, and frankly very irritated. The ONE freaking time I had a working router for more than a month, the stupid third-party junk ruined it...
tooki
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Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
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I'd use the procedure here, with appropriate modifications for Terminal versus MS-DOS command prompt. While your router doesn't seem to be "dead" as such, it really does sound like an incomplete firmware upgrade or downgrade has left bad code somewhere in it. By doing your best to make sure the only thing in the flash ROM is Linksys code, you can at least get it back to a less unstable situation. Go with the EARLIEST Linksys firmware version you can find, but make sure it really and truly is for your hardware version.
Sorry about the rotten luck with the WRT. I've been too busy to fool around with my own equipment, so maybe I've just been lucky or maybe my different setup (separate router and wireless access point) is less prone to problems.
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Last edited by tooki; Jan 11, 2006 at 03:20 PM.
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Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Sep 2005
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If you can't get it back up using any of the revival techniques, would you mind shipping it to me? I'll take it, even if it's broken, and pay the shipping cost.
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Senior User
Join Date: Aug 2000
Location: Ancaster, Ontario, Canada
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Admin Emeritus
Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
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Well, I tried this after I posted, and so far it's been working OK (though it could just mean that it's rebooted itself while I was asleep):
-reset to factory config
-re-flash firmware
-reset to factory config again
-manually configure, again
tooki
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Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
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So far every Linksys I've messed with that has scared me with "not working at all" symptoms (except the one that jumped off the shelf, of course) has eventually responded to a long power off and a long reset. Usually it's more a question of which order the thing wants the power off and the reset done...but it usually works fairly quickly.
I'm glad you're back in operation, though I'm still puzzled at the Sveasoft firmware giving you problems; it's reputed to be pretty solid.
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Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
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