Bricking the WRT54G

There is nothing like the freedom you get when you want to experiment with a device and you have a spare device in case things go horribly wrong. A few years back, I blindly went forward and tried to upgrade the firmware on my Apex 600-A DVD player. Long story short - I turned a $170 DVD player into a paperweight. I then threw good money after bad, and purchased a $120 Apex 3201 DVD player, and then GINGERLY upgraded the player's and DVD drive's firmware just to get this player to play a DVD without jittering. Hello, I am a dork.

So recently I have had a bug in my head about getting some QoS ("Quality of Service" or "packet shaping" or "traffic shaping" or "whatever") working on my Linksys WRT54G wireless router for the purpose of not having to worry about using Skype while other events are happening on the network, because Skype gets first priority (Read: Anti Net-Neutrality for the home). The WRT54G's built in firmware has a QoS piece that works only with attached devices and not with wireless devices - I guess Linksys/Cisco thinks that a $50 off the shelf device would compete with their professional devices that cost thousands. And lucky me an extra fell from the sky into my lap.

Now, again, "two" is very liberating. I could try some freely available "hacked" firmware, without worry.

A very promising firmware I tried was OpenWrt (more background here) but I only wanted to spend 3 hours or so on this project. OpenWrt's interface was too unfamiliar and pretty darn deep. I would need a real time commitment to do it justice, but I will come back to OpenWrt later to really give it a workout.

I tried a couple Sveasoft versions from here (but good Lord the the controversy of this page, so don't click the link). I settled on the last Alchemy version. The newer version, Talisman (or hacked "Freeman"), was a configuration nightmare, waiting 2 to 3 minutes for any slight change to update.

Sigh. Sveasoft's Alchemy sucked. Buggy. Interface crashes. And there was a noticeable slowdown in the wi-fi connection. I was better off where I began.

Along the way, I bricked my original router. The power light was flashing constantly and could not be accessed. I did remember reading somehow using TFTP can bring it back to life. I found some really good instructions on the resuscitation. I learned 2 things (ala Stan Marsh): that there is a built in TFTP program in Windows XP and that they really did make the WRT54G idiot-proof, or, in this case, me-proof.

So, I ended up just putting the firmware that was already on the device back on the device. QoS will go something like this around here...

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John: "Christi, are you downloading anything? I'm gonna Skype Mike."

Christi: "Nope, but you are downloading that perfectly legal video program using the bittorrent?"

John: "Yes, I should pause the downloading of the aforementioned legal program before using Skype."

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We really do talk like that. I use the word "aforementioned" all the time. Really.