This is a success story telling how I get run Barrier Breaker (RC2) on a new TP-Link WDR4300 v1.7 with original firmware.
Connect your PC to the router using a wire and do this:

1. Update the Firmware
At the TP-Link homepage download latest firmware  (Jun 17th 2014) and flash it on the WDR4300 using the webinterface of the router. The default login is admin/admin.

2. Flash OpenWRT Barrier Breaker
Download the latest version of  Barrier Breaker (File: ar71xx/generic/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-wdr4300-v1-squashfs-factory.bin ). While I am writing this the latest version is Barrier Breaker RC2 .
Flash it by using the TP-Link routers webinterface (like a firmware update).

3. Make the router accessable
Set your PCs network adress to 192.168.1.2 and execute :

telnet 192.168.1.1

Now set the root password for the router by calling:

passwd

Reboot the router. It will work now. But the release candidate version of OpenWRT will not have a webinterface (luci).
You can configure it by using ssh (login as root) or you install luci.

4. Install LUCI
Using the final version you will probably skip this step.
For Barrier Breaker RC2  go to
http://downloads.openwrt.org/barrier_br … /packages/
and download those packages:

libiwinfo_49_ar71xx.ipk
libiwinfo-lua_49_ar71xx.ipk
liblua_5.1.5-1_ar71xx.ipk
libubus-lua_2014-07-03-..._ar71xx.ipk
libuci-lua_2014-04-11.1-1_ar71xx.ipk
lua_5.1.5-1_ar71xx.ipk
luci-app-firewall_svn-r10459-1_ar71xx.ipk
luci-base_svn-r10459-1_ar71xx.ipk
luci-i18n-english_svn-r10459-1_ar71xx.ipk
luci-lib-nixio_svn-r10459-1_ar71xx.ipk
luci-mod-admin-full_svn-r10459-1_ar71xx.ipk
luci-proto-ppp_svn-r10459-1_ar71xx.ipk
luci_svn-r10459-1_ar71xx.ipk
luci-theme-bootstrap_svn-r10459-1_ar71xx.ipk
luci-theme-openwrt_svn-r10459-1_ar71xx.ipk
uhttpd_2014-06-11-..._ar71xx.ipk
uhttpd-mod-lua_2014-06-11-..._ar71xx.ipk
uhttpd-mod-ubus_2014-06-11-..._ar71xx.ipk

Pack it in a tar file and copy it on the router:

scp NAME.tar root@192.168.1.1:/tmp

On the router execute this using ssh:

cd /tmp
tar -xvf NAME.tar
opkg install *.ipk
reboot

After that you can call the router via webinterface by opening http://192.168.1.1/ in a webbrowser.

(Last edited by tomcom on 2 Aug 2014, 23:54)

Would be a lot easier to configure WAN after install and simply install Luci with:

opkg update
opkg install luci

Way easier than downloading a ton of files, compressing them, and then transferring them to the router.

If your modem supports DHCP, the default configuration will enable WAN automatically.

Hello @tomcom
How is your router doing with Barrier Breaker so far?
Any issues?

Thanks in advance

The tut seemed very simple...so it didn't work for me.

After installing Luci (throught SSH using the simplified opkg install luci, I did a opkg update first), my browser returns "Bad Gateway...The process did not produce any response".

Any ideas?

I just flashed BB RC3 to a v1.7 WDR4300, and it worked without any extra config. Loaded couple of packages, even updated luci and all seems well.

I flashed BB RC3 to my v1.7 WDR4300 tonight, and it's working great so far. (Without any extra configuring)