WRT54 firmware woes

I've been running DD-WRT on my LinkSys WRT54G routers for years.  It's always served me well.  I recently found out that if you want to make the new Windows 7 homegroups work you MUST have IPv6 connectivity on your LAN.  That does not work out of the box with DD-WRT.  It doesn't help that there hasn't been a new build of DD-WRT for a few years.  DD-WRT has IPv6 options but they are clunky and require additional scripting to work properly.

So, I started looking for alternatives.  I had heard of Tomato firmware before but never tried it.  Seems the "Shibby" version has most of the features I wanted so I grabbed a copy.  I must say I am truly impressed.  This firmware has so many sweet features it almost blew me away.  Go to the site and check the list.  The really nice thing is that IPv6 support just works out of the box.

The one issue I had was in flashing to the new firmware.  I would up bricking my WRT54GS v3.  Normally that's not an issue and I can recover it pretty easy.  This time the boot loader crashed hard and it was looking like I was headed to a JTAG cable to clear it.  I found this nice guide "The WRT54G Revival Guide"  that allows you to bypass the JTAG option.  By using the methods here I was able to reset the flash on the router and it cam back running the Shibby Tomato firmware I had loaded.

One gotcha with Tomato when upgrading from DD-WRT:

• The GUI username is "admin" or "root" (username is required), ssh and telnet username is always "root", and the default password is "admin".
• By default, the SES (aka AOSS, EZ-Setup) button is programmed to start a password-less telnet daemon at port 233 if held for 20+ seconds. If you run into a problem of not being able to login, you can use this to view or reset the password ("nvram get http_passwd" and "nvram set http_passwd=newpassword"). You can disable this behavior in Admin/Buttons.

This is from the Tomato read me file.

So everything is good.....for now.  Now I just need to get the remote units upgraded and the homegroup should start working.

 

Life is full of wayward wrenches...

and sometimes you get in ones way...

Just last week I was happily working on servers, decommissioning old equipment, writing scripts, and doing those things that a system admin does.  Then, wham, I get laid off.  The company is being reorganized and has to eliminate  1/3 of the staff.  A bit cliche I must say, to be laid off just before Christmas, but it is what it is.  So, here I am sending out resumes.  Oh well, life goes on.