I got the brilliant idea to upgrade my router software today. I was running a custom firmware on my WRT54G but for some reason I thought it’d be good to upgrade to the latest official release. The router didn’t agree with me.
Worse yet: I was silly enough to do this remotely and had to wait to get home from work until I could fix this. Once I got my hands on the router, I first tried a simple reset, hoping that it would be enough to clear the configuraiton. Unfortunately, that proved unsuccessful and I still couldn’t access my box, so I tried recovering by reflashing the firmware using TFTP which wouldn’t work either. As a last resort, I had to open the router and short Pins 15 and 16 on the Intel IC (as described in several online forums) to get the beast into recovery mode. In case you’re interested, here’s what a WRT54G v1.1 looks like when without it’s case:
To cut a long story short, I managed to reflash the official firmware, found it to be lacking port forwarding entries in the web interface (it has 10, I need 11) and ended up flashing the previous firmware and manually typing in all my old settings again (the configuration backup feature looks nice but is quite useless when the restore does nothing but crash the router). Eventually, after about 10 hours of downtime, I’m a little wiser but still back to where I started. Have fun with the blog and the gallery while you can access them. (I still haven’t started working on the actual site yet. Maybe some other time, when I’m really really bored.)