Yesterday was a bad day for me. INET blacked out. Database crashed. It took about 4 hours to repair a very big database table. I have to run extended repair 4 hours continuously. After that everything backed to normal state but I fell so stress and I wanted to do something to relax, something fun. So I decided to upgrade my router firmware. My router is WRT54GL that I bought since July, 2007. The upgrading should be very simple just enter the web interface, click browse and then click upgrade. That was just the beginning of a long night.

The firmware I wanted to use is DD-WRT v24 RC7. I downloaded dd-wrt.v24_std_generic.bin and then went to Linksys to get the latest official firmware 4.30.12. My plan was to:

• Upgrade to Linksys 4.30.12
• Upgrade to DD-WRT v24 RC7

Above steps should be completed in not more than 30 minutes so I started to proceed at 23:30. Note that my connection to the router was wireless. And the steps I did are:

1. Reset to factory default
2. Upgrade firmware to 4.30.12
3. Hard reset

Unfortunately, the router stopped working. I saw only blinking power led. Wireless was not available at all. I had to find my old lan line for recovering. The default IP should be 192.168.1.1/24 so I set my laptop to 192.168.1.2/24. Sadly, the router did not response my ping. I had to use my phone to tweet and then connected the ADSL modem directly to my laptop to surf the internet to find something useful. I spent 2 hours 30 minutes to find that this situation was not good at all. I had only a few choices.

1. If ping works, tftp might help.
2. If ping does not work, I have to void the warranty to open the box and short something inside to activate failsafe mode for tftp again.
3. If tftp does not work, JTAG is the only hope

When I was thinking to give up and to claim it tomorrow, I found 2 articles.

• bricked wrt54gl router with alchemy
• Blinking Power or Diag LED on a Linksys Router

The magic word was to retry and did not care about ping. Cool! So I just tried this approach at 2:30. w00t! It worked like a charm. So I continued the process to install DD-WRT. Anyway, it seemed DD-WRT std was too big so I installed DD-WRT mini and then DD-WRT std after that. w00t! It worked perfectly. 3am. Time to sleep.

Flames to dust
Lovers to friends
Why do all good things come to an end

Flames to dust
Routers to bricks
Why do all good things come to an end