At the risk of descending into utter nerdiness, I’m mulling over the idea of overwriting my home wireless router’s firmware with what is basically a Linux operating system. I’m looking at either DD-WRT or OpenWrt.

To start off, I’m a little nervous, because the label on the bottom of the router says, in bold letters, “WGT624 v2″, and no where can I find information on anyone who has installed either Linux distribution on a v2. However, when I look closer at the label, I see that the FCC ID for the device ends with a v3. Additionally, the router’s current web administration page lists the hardware version as V3:

So, given that 2 of 3 represents a majority. I’m forging onward to update the v3 hardware. Right? Well, maybe…

A quick comparison of the two Linux dists’ web sites shows that DD-WRT doesn’t look too promising with regard to compatibility with my v2/v3 router (see this page), while the OpenWrt may work out.

After that initial research, I decided to take a baby step. Before wiping out my router, I went ahead and unlocked it, allowing me to telnet into it. This way, I figure, I’ll at least be able to ask my router, “hey router, what version are you?” Of course, it may not know any better than its label, but it’s worth a shot. I doubt very much that I’ll ask it whether or not it cares to have its memory wiped and then updated. The instructions for unlocking, which worked beautifully, are available here. I ran through the instructions from Windows, which meant going through the following:

1. Downloading the telnetEnable.zip from this location.
2. Took only the executable out of the zip file (i.e., extracted telnetEnable.exe)
3. Open a command prompt with Administrative privileges (I’m running Windows Vista here, so I hit the Start menu, started typing Command Prompt, then right-clicked on the Command Prompt and chose Run as Administrator).
4. In the command prompt, I typed arp -a and copied down the Physical Address of my router, which was at the top of the list and ended with a “.1″. I then removed the dashes and changed the lowercase letters to uppercase letters
5. Since I had put the telnetEnable executable in my root C: drive, I typed in the following command (still in the command prompt) and hit enter, which almost immediately went to the next prompt, meaning I got no errors, which is what I wanted:
   telnetEnable.exe 192.168.1.1 000FB5213DB0 Gearguy Geardog

After all of that, I was able to telnet into the router by using PuTTy, since the Vista command prompt couldn’t find Telnet. The username at the telnet prompt is Gearguy and the password is Geardog (both are case sensitive). At the telnet command prompt, typing in help gives bunches of commands, if you want to poke around some.

I started off by typing in wla get hardware, which returned the following:

wlan1 revisions: mac 5.8 phy 4.4 analog 4.6
PCI Vendor ID: 0x168c, Device ID: 0x13
Sub Vendor ID: 0x168c, Sub Device ID: 0x13
chip is AR2312

That’s interesting; that’s remarkably different than what I see here.

Note that at this point my router flaked out, and I had to reset it (i.e., unplug for 10 secs before plugging it back in again). Then I had to disable and then re-enable my PC’s network connection (which, sadly, I pretty much always have to do when I have network issues - the Vista network connection center just doesn’t do it with my Realtek, built-in ethernet ports, [[sigh]]).

Given that I just got my internet connection back to finish updating this post - and my daughter just woke up from her nap - I’m going to run off and mull over my wireless router’s differences from the rest of the world’s, decide what to do, and then come back later with more info and a decision. Stay tuned!