WL-500g Premium died After Upgrading Firmware

[acidbrain]

Hi folks!

It seems like i bricked my brand new Asus WL-500g deluxe while playing with OpenWRT WhiteRussian RC1.
I messed up the firewall rules and locked my self out.
I did "iptables -F", but the default policy for INPUT is DROP... sad

Unfortunately, rebooting the router did not make it accessible again.
I tried to reflash the firmware but tftp says Timeout.
The ASUS firmware utility doesn't help either.


Any ideas are welcome!

Edit: The router responds to arp request, but not to ping.

[acidbrain]

The people at the #openwrt channel told me how to do a proper reset.:
Removing power, wait 20 sec, put power back, wait 3 sec, push reset for 10 sec.
Then you should be able to telnet/ssh again.

It works, but all my configuration is lost

[sMiLe]

Hi there,

I recently flashed my wl-500gP with Olegs pre4 and it worked for a few minutes. I was just transfering data via samba onto the external harddisk when it passed out and did not respond anymore. I cannot enter the restoration mode, when I press the restore button and plug in AC it reacts just as if I not push the restore button at all. I read similar effects on other routers of the wl-500 series and also read something about pin 10. Is there a similar workaround for the 500gP?

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanx in advance
sMiLe

[nublete]

Are you sure you're pushing the "reset" and not the "ez setup" button ? If yes, try holding it pushed for at least 10 seconds before plugging the AC back.

[sMiLe]

Yes, I'm sure it's not EzSetup. I did use the Restore button before and it worked, but now, it's not doin anything

Hello again,

I finally found out which flash memory is used in the wl-500gP. It's an spansion S29GL064M90. The specs are here: http://www.spansion.com/datasheets/s29gl-m_00_b5_e.pdf

Unfortunately, I honestly have no clue about flash memory and hence do not know if and how the pin 10 trick can be applied to the wl-500gP. Maybe Oleg can provide any help? I read a similar procedure was done with the wl-500b before...

Kind regards,
sMiLe

[adolfotregosa]

yes you can apply the pin 10 trick. i did it myself !

[sMiLe]

Hi,

can you give me some details? I tried it but nothing happened Did you ground pin 10?

Nevertheless, I think I already trashed my Flash by messing around with the pins...

OK, talking to myself here, but Oleg proposed a fix in the firmware discussion. For anybody having the same problem and reading this thread: Pin 9 has to be grounded while powering up, afterwards, the restoreation mode will work again...

[dwojtas]

Hi,

I have just bought a WL500g Premium router.
And on the 1st day I have lost control over it: flashing with OpenWRT (worked), then trying some network settings ... and it stopped responding.

Before I broke it (even after flashing with openWRT) I could see it's wireless interface (appeared on my Windows box, I could recognize it by MAC), I could also work with SSH over one of 4 LAN ports.
Then after changing some nvram parameter is ttopped responding.
No ping, no wireless interface.
Blind.

But hapily it still accepts tftp upload using the WAN port (lan port do not work although the port lights seem to flash as expected).
Using WAN i could upload some firmwares, but I found that only after using
wl500g-recover.trx (as described here http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=515 )
it constantly responds for pings to 192.168.1.1 on WAN (LAN ports are quiet).
But I cannot access it using telnet or ssh. These ports do not respond.
I have also tried the wl500g-clear-nvram.trx but with no success - after uploading it, and then some other firmware (eg. the wl500g-recover.trx firmware) - I still did not go any further.

Does telnetd start only on LAN interfaces (not responding for me) that I cannot access it?
How to enable telnetd on WAN using 192.168.1.1 ?
Any other firmware?

Now only ping works, but I cannot reset any settings, nothing ...
Any help?

Darek

[Oleg]

connect serial console or use pin9 hack...

[thenextdon13]

Hello all,

I know this may be slightly off topic, because I was using dd-wrt rather than Oleg's firmware but:

Last night I got v23 SP2 ASUS VPN version running on my wl-500. I initially set the clockfreq to 300 (by doing nvram set clkfreq=300, then nvram commit, the reboot).

Box came back up fine, reported 300mhz (cpuinfo).

I then proceeded to enable jffs, usb support, knockd, etc.

For jffs, the original command line commands didn't seem to work, so i grep'd nvram show for all jffs variables, and set the following to 1 (it worked then for a while after this... and through other reboots.. so I modified the wiki's for the subject)

nvram set jffs_mounted=1
nvram set enable_jffs2=1
nvram set sys_enable_jffs2=1
nvram set clean_jffs2=1
nvram set sys_clean_jffs2=1
nvram commit

reboot

So, a couple of hours later after getting things figured out a bit with knockd, etc, I noticed that the wireless 'signal quality' was quite poor for the laptop right next to the router (30-55 %, cycling, sometimes dropping).

I decided this was possibly because of the oveclocking or the increase in txpower to 70, so:
1. i decreased the txpower to 30, still no change, so
2. Changed clkfreq to 266.

On reboot, the router never came back- the power LED would stay on. That is not the problem at this point, story continues---

So, the router would still go into recovery mode (by pressing the reset button during reboot), so I knew it was saveable. It would not reply to ping requests.

Then I shorted the solder connection by pin 9 (as listed in the sticky at the top of the forums) for 15 seconds. The power LED went out, and i could again ping the unit YAY! Smile ... WELLLL... Went about my way resetting things. This time I set the JFFS in the web GUI (as well as 'clean jffs'), and the router never came back from reboot.

So, now the power led on the router never lights up, not even if trying to go into 'recovery mode'.

The router does appear to work as a switch still. And with the case off, you can see that the wlan led lights dimly at boot (and stays lit), as do all of the eth connections if a single device is conected (the one led for the connected port is full brightness)

I see on http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/User_talk:Oxo that someone is working on console connectivity to the unit, but the specifics are not listed. It looks like it requires building an external rs232 circuit.


Comments/suggestions anyone?

[Oleg]

Have you tried pin9 trick again?

[thenextdon13]

Have you tried pin9 trick again?

Oleg--

Thanks for your reply. Yes, i've tried the pin9 trick again, to no avail.

I found schematics for a rs232/uart converter, but am not 100% sure this is what I need.

Have you worked with the uart/serial interface much?

take care
Camden

[Oleg]

yes, i've 2 serial cables made of nokia phone cables...

[thenextdon13]

yes, i've 2 serial cables made of nokia phone cables...

Hmmm..
Does the board natively support rs232?

If not what all is required?

From what I was reading, it would require a rs232 chip (which i have), as well as a uart chip of some sort. is this correct? Or was this for a previos version of the wl500?

The instructions here (http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/User_talk:Oxo) are quite cryptic.... would you mind clarifying? Maybe i understand...if UART2 an external uart chip in the circuit that he built, and he is using UART1 on the circuit board, and not using UART0 at all. That would make sense...

[quote]
Ok, the connector is soldered on, so now we need to check software.

* start for example minicom and connect to ...UART2
* check that there is no echo of characters
* connect UART2 tx to rx
* check that there IS echo of characters
* connect UART2 tx to UART1 rx and UART2 rx to UART1 tx
* try and connect to prompt...
[end quote]

If a uart and max232 chip are required, how did you build these into the nokia cable with a power supply/voltage regulator?

Thank you very much, Oleg!! I am hoping to learn a little something doing this... have done some circutry, but not much. As well as hopefully find that my wl-500 is not totally bricked

take care
Camden

[Oleg]

you do not need uart for the wl500g premium.
the thing you need is level shifter, which usually built using max 3232 or max232 ic.

just search for any wrt54g tutorial - it's exactly the same (except the board pin out).