Hi,
Has anyone remotely installed openWrt on his linksys?
In fact, I am now 8000km away from my wrt54gs I just bought before leaving, and the linksys firmware doesn't fullfil my needs. Upgrading remotely can be dangerous but if someone has already done that it can help me..
Let me precise something, it is a partial remote upgrade because I can log on a PC behind the router. This way I can initiate the upgrading process locally..The only this I need is to be sure that I'll have a remote access after it.
I don't see any big problems with doing that(except that if it fails I am f...) but maybe there are?
Thanks,
Bye
Jeremy

Good luck with that.  You'll need to preconfigure an OpenWRT image to make sure it does the port forwarding and firewall holing necessary to access your network from outside.  This is no simple task.

Sincerely,
Regards
Nate

I might suggest using screen on that PC behind the router so whatever process your start does not get killed because the SSH session dies during the reboot of the WRT54GS.

But I've never updated to OpenWRT remotely, so my suggestion is just one of the things you will need to consider.

I did this for friend a while back. I had him configure his system with 2 network cards; one set to 192.168.1.2/255.255.255.0 NO Gateway and NO DNS (on that nic).....and the other via DHCP live on the Internet (cable access, and yes the WRT was linked to the Internet through the WAN port as well)

I had him securely lock down his desktop firewall to only allow RDP inbound from my home IP Address. I logged into his desktop downloaded the openwrt firmware and tftp2.exe client to his system and ran the upgrade. Everything went fine!

He was there ready willing and able for me to walk him through anything I needed. Which now that I think about....he did have to press the reset buttons a few times to clear things up. No biggie there. I'm a network guy and he's a programmer so we compliment each other pretty good when it comes to these things....hopefully you'll have access to someone who can at least follow directions and try to understand they're your eyes while they're helping you!

Can you tell I work for a company that has remote users? LOL

Remote users I might add that have WRT's running openswan and serving tftp boot images to IP Phones!

I love this project!

Good luck!

Dan

very tricky problem, 1st issue you will run into, is once the upgrade has completed, it will not connect to the internet without some tweaking, 2nd prob, telnet is not open on the wan by default!

there might be other ways to accompish this, but this sounds best to me, If you can compile a succesful buildroot (Which is not very hard with the current make process), modify the firstboot script, and at the end of it, place a few commands to setup all the nvram parameters for the connection (If its pppoe, obviosly compile with pppoecd option), its actually probably much cleaner to rather write a script to configure the nvram values, and point firstboot to it!

thats part 1 taken care of, part 2 would simply be to modify S45firewall to allow access from wan on the default telnet port.

Compile .bin, and send it over from the internal machine.

I hope thats everything you'll need to get access after install

Note, this post is an opinion to a solution, if you haven't played with openwrt before, I recommend using it first on another router, to ensure you put in all the right settings, and definitely test your .bin on a local router first, as bootfailsafe is NOT one of your options!

Good luck!

Hi,

Thanks for all your advices, I have another options now: someone can put another router between the WRT and my modem, so whatever happens I'll have an connection up.
I dont't have the time to do it now finally, but when I'll do it I let you know how it was..

Bye

Jeremy