Hello,

I came here seeking for help because i'm facing a situation.

I just bought a wrt54gl linksys router from some guy on ebay, and it appears that it has openwrt on it. When I link it to my computer, it gives me an adress with DHCP but I can't access the Web UI. The guy gave me the root password, so I can successfully ssh into it, and i saw it is running White Russian 0.9 version. If I try to browse to http://192.168.10.1 (which is the router adress) I can see openWrt logo for a second, and then it redirects me to "http://192.168.10.1/cgi-bin/webif.sh" which gives me a 404 error. The Web UI never asked me for authentication. I suppose the guy must have put some scripts in it.

I just want to reset it to default settings, or flash it back to the factory firmware. So I browsed OpenWrt wiki, documentation and some blogs, and here is what I can tell :
- It seems the guy disabled the failsage mode (is that possible ?) When I tried to failsafe boot it, it looks successful (power and DMZ led blinking) but I can't telnet or acess adress 192.168.10.1 or 192.168.1.1 (I of course tried manual IP on my computer for the both networks).
- I tried to contact the router with tftp, but I believe it is disabled to. When I try "tftp 192.168.10.1" in my command prompt I just end up with a "tftp>" prompt and commands don't seem to work when I enter them.

I'm desperate, and can't think of any other solution. Could you please provide some help to reset this router, of flash it with linksys firmware. As I said, I have the root password and can successfully ssh into it. I can provide you with the results of any commands you can tell me to try.

Thank you in advance.
Regards

(Last edited by YassT on 27 Mar 2012, 19:32)

YassT,

You can reflash this router easily using the mtd command and the right TRX file.  Consider maybe this one for a wrt54GL:
http://downloads.openwrt.org/whiterussi … uashfs.trx

According to this page (http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/techref/mtd) you can run mtd to drop the new firmware into place.  First you'll want to scp it up, though:

1. ssh in, use df to check for space
2. wget the TRX URL
3. scp the TRX file to 192.168.10.1:/tmp or so
4. (ssh back in and) look in the router's /tmp for the filename.trx
5. do a  mtd -r write /tmp/filename.trx linux    using the name of the file you uploaded
6. wait for the reboot
7. rejoice, post update to the forum

I do this frequently, and it's never killed a unit.  My command line history is littered with statements like:
  scp newbuild.trx root@10.1.1.1:/tmp/openwrt.trx
  ssh root@10.1.1.1 "mtd -e linux -r write /tmp/openwrt.trx linux"

Having said that, though, I don't know how safe it is -- that's my disclaimer.  So don't do it if you aren't exactly sure of what you're doing.

(Last edited by bishopolis on 11 Apr 2012, 14:54)