WL-500g Premium aka WL-500gP Info

Hi everyone,

I am from Romania and the guys at the store here told me that WL-500g is no longer available , and it will be replaced by "WL-500g Premium".

I wanted to buy a WL-500g but that is no longer possible so now I have to buy a WL-500gP. But before I do that I just wanted to ask if this model also supports firmware upgade like WL-500g did ??

What are de differences between WL-500g and WL-500gP ??

I need this router to perform QOS in my lan ... is this still possible ??

Thanks in advance
Mircea

I have no knowledge of an upcoming device called wl-500gP, but there will definately be the wl-700gE coming. Think it's safe to say that this one will do EVERYTHING you ever wanted to do with a router :) (cept flying to the moon, that might need a firmware upgrade or two ;) )

This is the link for the router ...

http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l...21&modelmenu=1

Oh cool, thx for the link. Didn't know they are continuing the 500 series.

The obvious differences are "UPnP Media Server (whatever that is)" and the "Download Machine" (for example a Bittorrent client I expect, like the wl-700gE), a 0.3A more powerful DC adaptor (i think the wl-500gx had 2A), that would be good for USB devices without own power supply. I'm trying to download the manual to check for QoS ability, but DL speed is SLOOOOW!

Edit: Yes according to manual it has the "Bandwith Management" known from the wl-500g(x).

UPnP mediaserver is a media streaming server that supports the UPnP standard, like the Twonkyvision server for example.

For an (incomplete) list of hardware players that support this standard, chek out this link :
http://www.twonkyvision.de/UPnP/devices.html

Googling around, I found http://www.cloetens.be/indeling/WLANMarch06.pdf: "WL-500gP is the latest router from WL-500g series. Equipped with much faster CPU power (300MHz) and 8MB flash memory, enhancing performance, stability, and more possibility of putting customized firmware."

I remember reading something like having 64Mb of RAM on the device... Can anyone confirm this?

And it seems to have the same price as the older WL-500g's here in The Netherlands: from about E86,- (http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/137102). Sounds like a really good price-performance ratio (in contrast to the WL-700).

I don't know if anyone has uploaded any custom made firmwares to it.

Add an USB-VGA adaptor and a USB keyboard, and you've got a very-low-end competitor for the EPIAs :)

So in fact it's a wl-700gE without the built-in HD. Same CPU and so on ... too bad there's not much known about the inner life yet.
And the price makes me hope I'll get my hands on one of those (at least much sooner than I could afford the wl-700gE).

Accidentally bought it yesterday.

1) Management interface is terrible and unreliable, still the same look and feel as 3 years ago when I briefly owned a WL500g. Unline Linksys, it needs restart for every change and you never really know if it's coming back or not. Sometimes the web interface doesn't come up, usually the DHCP IP assignement failes and I need to 'repair' my wireless connection. Really annoying.
2) There is NO WAY to increase the power output beyond its default value (9 in the scale 1-84) - router simply ignores the setting. Coverage in my appartment is therefore pretty bad. Hope this gets fixed with firmware update.
3) Managed to hook in an USB device (Flash key), can browse it with my Windows Explorer, but DownloadMaster can't detect the settings no matter what I set in the management interface. So the potentially cool feature does not work. Next firmware update, perhaps?
4) Biggest problem: power plug of my wl500gp is badly built. So just by slightly moving the device, the power gets cut off. When I was playing with USB, this happened a lot and router managed to lose all my settings. It took 3 restores and reconfigurations to get everything back.

ASUS, I am not happy!

If you're going to install a custom firmware these aren't probably serious problems, are they?
Can you check the amount of ram the device has and the cpu clock?
What about the performance of an attached hdd with an usb2.0 enclosure?

USB works beautifully, it's really fast.

----------------
MEMINFO
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 14651392 13529088 1122304 0 749568 4759552
Swap: 0 0 0
MemTotal: 14308 kB
MemFree: 1096 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 732 kB
Cached: 4648 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 4760 kB
Inactive: 4436 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 14308 kB
LowFree: 1096 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 0 kB

-----------------
CPUINFO
system type : Broadcom BCM4704 chip rev 8
processor : 0
cpu model : BCM3302 V0.6
BogoMIPS : 262.96
wait instruction : no
microsecond timers : yes
tlb_entries : 32
extra interrupt vector : no
hardware watchpoint : no
VCED exceptions : not available
VCEI exceptions : not available
unaligned_instructions : 13
dcache hits : 67633165
dcache misses : 256
icache hits : 524800
icache misses : 0
instructions : 0

i am indeed an asus rookie. just discovered the infamous "/usr/sbin/wl -i eth2 txpwr 84" command and surely it is ignored by the router the very same way as in the management interface. strange.

i have one of this baby too :P
I installed dd-wrt on it (first what firmware version u have on urs as i made backup of mine ;) ) .Now compiling the dd-wrt to have the usb support inbuild ;)

florin, my firmware version is 1.9.6.2. have you managed to enable usb support? where do i get this distro?

Hello!

I ned some firmware to upgrade radio power on asus wl-500g premium access point for bridge! Can someone help me?

Well it's been reported OpenWrt is running on wl-500g, don't know if the power setting is working tho. Don't know about Oleg's FW yet. BUT ... you know increasing the power is rarely the best solution, using better antennas instead (even the ones ou can build yourself ) will usually give you real improvements.

I know but default power is 9 mw i can speed up to 12mw but i need minimum 40 mw and i need some firmware to do this.

www.dd-wrt.com
to enable usb in dd-wrt or in the default firmware?
In the dd-wrt i compiled the modules for it so if u need it i can send them to you ;)
For the default firmware, make sure the usb disk /stick has standard partions (i had 1 with 4 partitions and didn't recognised my stick , so i had to make a single partion and was working ok).

dear florin, i'm highly interested in your compiled version. do you need an email / ftp address to send it to or can you give me some coordinates?

btw, two more questions:
- were you able to make downloadmanager work
- what is the max radio power you can set in your firmware? (see http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=5319)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by grongl

USB works beautifully, it's really fast.

---

edit: that's subjective, how many Mbytes/sec reading/writing to disk?

Quote:

---

----------------
MEMINFO
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 14651392 13529088 1122304 0 749568 4759552

---

So only 14Megs? :(

http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=5270

After running

Code:

---

wl txpwr1 -m 150 -o

---

in the console, the

Code:

---

/usr/sbin/wl txpwr

---

returns

Code:

---

pwr in mw 87
pwr in mw after override adj 87
150

---

Web interface still shows 12mw though.

In OpenWrt you can set the power output using the nvram variable "pa0maxpwr" ... the wl command for some reason did never do the trick (means no change in signal strength whatever value you set ).

I have try to extract the Image for WL-500g Premium:

# wlextract WL500gp_1.9.6.8_TW.trx
# dd if=WL500gp_1.9.6.8_TW.trx of=kernel.gz skip=28 bs=1 count=765205

the dd is needed because the wlextrace give you a too short file (1 Byte to small)

# mkdir root_fs
# uncramfs root_fs rootfs :D


and create a new cramfs Image:

# mkcramfs root_fs root_fs.cramfs
# cat root_fs.cramfs trailer > root_fs-and-trailer

ok that works fine but when i try to create the trx Image i get this warning:

# trx -o my_firmware_wl500gp.trx kernel.gz root_fs-and-trailer
warning: increasing offset 765233 to 765236 :confused:

and the extract of this new firmware gives a kernel image with 765208 bytes instead of 765204 or 765205

# wlextract my_firmware_wl500gp.trx
# ls -l kernel.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 765208 May 29 17:59 kernel.gz


Have somebody try this with success???

Tomek

ftp://dlsvr01.asus.com/pub/ASUS/wire...500gp_1968.zip

Could anybody port the daemon for the downloadmanager for each WL-500g ?
Would be a very nice feature ...