WL500g Premium - 7f-pre6 - URGENT ... now -pre7

[Oleg]

I've updated my firmware to workaround partial nvram loss problem. Everyone, who use my firmware, should upgrade to this latest version: http://oleg.wl500g.info/gp/WL500gp-1.9.2.7-7f-pre7.trx

With this firmware, your unit would correctly detect RESET button state, regardless of nvram settings. I'm still investigating the reason for nvram loss - this is sort of hardware problem.

Updated to -pre7. Added a new workarounds for flash handling. Flash programing is now much faster, hangups should go away when commiting nvram changes. MirrorBit flash technology hacks added... nvram CRC checks are also added. Only kernel is updated.

[r0kanon]

Hi Oleg, thanks very much for this notice. I have just completed wl-500Gp with HDD, enhanced-ctorrent and stuff like that. It has been working well for a week now. Do you think there is a way to keep customizations or shall I just complete torrents and take everything down, then re-install from scratch?

Cheers and just wanted to say - your work is excellent.

[Oleg]

You do not need to reinstall everything. Just flash new firmware and replace /sbin/rc with an updated one.

[r0kanon]

I updated the firmware, (by the way web interface refused to do that but ASUS recovery utility loaded it fine. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I had gx firmware on it before) however ...

You do not need to reinstall everything. Just flash new firmware and replace /sbin/rc with an updated one.

Oleg I somehow lost you there. What is updated /sbin/rc ?

I understand this is a binary that contains quite a few things (including reboot) and it comes with the firmware. So if I flash a new one on, the /sbin/rc is updated as well? Or is there something that I am just missing?

Many thanks

[seaky]

I've updated my firmware to workaround partial nvram loss problem. Everyone, who use my firmware, should upgrade to this latest version: http://oleg.wl500g.info/gp/WL500gp-1.9.2.7-7f-pre6.trx

With this firmware, your unit would correctly detect RESET button state, regardless of nvram settings. I'm still investigating the reason for nvram loss - this is sort of hardware problem.

Many thanks for your work!

[Pedro83]

Hi Oleg, thanks for new release. I've bought 500gP recently and still running Asus firmware. Do you still expect possibility of dead router? Is there any other way how to bring it then back to "life" except the trick with pin inside... I would like to install your firmware but i don't want to lose warranty. I will wait couple days probably to have responses from those braver thx for your work on firmware... P

[Oleg]

This is not a firmware problem, but hardware. The router "dies" with ASUS firmware too and DD-WRT as well.

[Pedro83]

oh, really sorry then... that's good news so I will give it try sooner or later... and what about the reset? just through pin? or any other option?

[Oleg]

oh, really sorry then... that's good news so I will give it try sooner or later... and what about the reset? just through pin? or any other option?

Reset should work fine now. I've added a code, which checks nvram validity (this feature does not exist in any other firmware at the moment) and automatically resets to defaults. Also, button is no longer depends on the nvram content. And finally, looks like the problem was due to hangups during nvram commit. Finally, the reason was that this new flash utilize MirrorBit technology which is not directly supported by linux. The flash supplies unexpected values during the query cycle, which are causing extra delays during write cycles. Etc, etc, etc... I've added a "hack" to workaround this issues.

[IvanS]

This is not a firmware problem, but hardware. The router "dies" with ASUS firmware too and DD-WRT as well.

Can we have some more details about this hw problem?
Is it something you/Asus can find a software workaround?

BTW I read that wl500gP should have some hw facility to speed up encryption? Does your firmware support it?

thanks and kudos for the great work you're doing

[Oleg]

Can we have some more details about this hw problem?
Is it something you/Asus can find a software workaround?

Read above.

BTW I read that wl500gP should have some hw facility to speed up encryption? Does your firmware support it?

No tech doc is available for this facility and there is no code utilizing it... Well, perhaps they're using the same arch as for accelerators, but nobody checked this.

[Banane]

The router "dies" with ASUS firmware too and DD-WRT as well.

I can confirm this. In my case it "died" with OpenWRT, see http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=7050 O.k. I build my own OpenWRT and maybe I did something wrong. But my build messages and results didn't look like that at first sight. I could only reanimate the router with PIN 9 (see also here: http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?p=35121#post35121 ). Before, I already observed strange nvram values: http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?p=34696#post34696 (I posted some nvram excerpts at the end of the post.)

So, if all this is true, Oleg has the only save firmware at the moment (with his workarounds)! Great work again, Oleg!

And here are my questions: Perhaps, I would like to change to Oleg's new firmware, even though I like OpenWRT, too. Are there any possibilities that Oleg's firmware does not have? Especially I want to access a DVD via USB and samba! Therefore I need USB-stuff, Samba-stuff and Kernel-filesystem-module for ISO9660 and UDF.

And I want to boot any customized firmware of my choice from an usb-medium. (This way I never need to do the PIN 9 again when I hacked too much.) Is it possible to boot from usb-media with Oleg's firmware like with OpenWRT? (http://wiki.openwrt.org/UsbStorageHo...ht=%28HowTo%29) Or vice versa: let OpenWRT on Asus and boot Oleg's from usb-medium somehow? Are the firmwares all the same: a busybox that can be "easily" bootet with

exec /bin/busybox init ?

Best regards

Thorsten

[Kosh]

I installed the WL500gp-1.9.2.7-7f-pre7.trx two days ago on my WL500gP. I followed the tutorial http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=5909 to install several packages. The only part I skipped was the "Extend RAM to 32MB" section of that tutorial, because free returns the following on my box:

              total         used         free       shared      buffers
  Mem:        30140        28684         1456            0         1048
 Swap:       136544         2804       133740
Total:       166684        31488       135196

So it seems to me, that the 32MB memory are already available. Has the latest firmware version been modified to support the 32MB out of the box? If I look at the sdram values in the nvram I find the following values:

sdram_ncdl=0x507
sdram_init=0x0009

The value "sdram_ncdl=0x507" differs from the "sdram_ncdl=0" in the tutorial. My question is now, if I would gain anything from setting the ncdl value in nvram, since the 32MB seems already available to me...

Tanks for your help,
Kosh

[Oleg]

I can confirm this. In my case it "died" with OpenWRT, see http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=7050

Actually, the fix is possible for openwrt too... There are 2 patches in my sources which are fixing this...

[bbaccsi]

Oleg, I've experienced a problem with 7f pre6: on the web surface
if I clicked on save & restart I couldn't log in after restart, but
had to force a reeboot again from ssh. Does pre7 solve this problem also?
Thanks for your work!

Bbaccsi

I've updated my firmware to workaround partial nvram loss problem. Everyone, who use my firmware, should upgrade to this latest version: http://oleg.wl500g.info/gp/WL500gp-1.9.2.7-7f-pre7.trx

With this firmware, your unit would correctly detect RESET button state, regardless of nvram settings. I'm still investigating the reason for nvram loss - this is sort of hardware problem.

Updated to -pre7. Added a new workarounds for flash handling. Flash programing is now much faster, hangups should go away when commiting nvram changes. MirrorBit flash technology hacks added... nvram CRC checks are also added. Only kernel is updated.