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Linux Hacked Onto Fry's Cheap Wireless G Router
nerdyH points to this smile-inducing story at LinuxDevices which begins "An inexpensive house-brand 802.11b/g wireless router from Fry's (Outpost.com) has been adopted by a group of Linux hackers that aims to make Fry's 'AirLink' devices 'as capable as name-brand gadgets.' The AirLink101 AR315W is based on a Marvell board that can run Linux or eCos, and has a six-port 10/100 Ethernet switch built in. It's listed for $45 online, but is reportedly on sale for $20 in some Fry's stores."
Considering that I can get the LinkSys WRT54G at Amazon.com for $47 and flash it with the great DD-WRT firmware, I really don't see this device as being all that attractive.
I've been working on something similar: last Christmas, I picked up 3 Network Everywhere NWR04B wireless routers on sale -- $18 each! -- and have been trying ever since to duplicate this guy's success in getting uClinux (a version of Linux for CPUs with no MMU) running on the thing.
The guy who got it running originally hasn't responded to my emails, so it's a good thing he made his kernel tree available. Alsoplus, I think he used a JTAG adapter to load the image; since I wanted to make a firmware image that anyone could upload with the web interface, I had to reverse engineer the firmware checksum too. (Luckily it was a pretty simple checksum, or else I don't think I would've been able to do it...I'm really learning all this as I go along.)
In July I finally managed to get a kernel panic, am now trying to get BusyBox working on the thing. I keep getting these errors:
which, from what I have been able to Google, may be because of differing opinions (libc/uClibc vs. the kernel vs. the chip) about whether or not this thing has an FPU. If anyone's got any suggestions, please leave a note -- I need all the help I can get.
It's been an incredible learning experience -- I know more now about how the kernel interacts with CPUs, the filesystems, compilers and the bootloader than I ever had. (Still got tons to learn, mind you.) I'm looking forward to the day I can get a Beowulf cluster of these things going. :-)
Carousel is a lie!
They probably mean to incorporate SPI, WPA, TKP, AES, VPN, Mac filtering, and or content filtering. You know features that you typically don't see until you are over the $150 range.
the title says its been hacked onto it, but the article seems to be soliciting people to try to create a linux firmware instead. Plus the article that it links to (http://mhos.free.fr/ar315w/ar315w.htm), just lists specs; nothing about linux.
13 posts in and half the posts are of the "why bother" variety. For cryin' out loud -- why not? First off, it's cool someone can do this. More importantly, it frees people from using devices in a manner only approved by the manufacturer. Sure, right now most devices will behave in a manner the user generally wants. But what about in the future when everything is so DRM/spyware infested you can't open your fridge without Coca-Cola's approval or knowledge. The people who are learning how to hack these things are our insurance against what might be a bleak future. Instead of making idiotic "seems pointless to me" comments, how about looking at the big picture. And even if that dark future never arises -- so what -- these guys have skills. They deserve a bit more respect than I'm seeing here. One thing is certain, I sure wish I had their abilities.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Fine, here's just a few:
Bridged mode for point to point. Think about extending two buildings as though an ethernet cable was simply connecting the two physical networks
Plain access point, not router
Promicuous mode for war driving
Mount to lan share to dump data for WEP cracking
etc. etc.
I'm a software engineer not a network engineer but its easy enough to see the possibilities.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
For example, HyperWRT has managed to find the setting on a WRT54G to double the output power. You can also modify the hardware to add an LCD display, two serial ports (to use as console, our you could connect a modem and setup a backup PPP dial-up connection in case of broadband outage) and a smart card slot. For $69 I got a small Linux box to play with, with working wireless, and a 200Mhz processor.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
Instant dirt-cheap thin client - USB can handle the networking, keyboard, and mouse, VGA gives you a screen.
Can you say ThinStation? I knew you could.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm writing to ask for your advice. I would like to upgrade my neighbor's Linksys WRT54G router with this HyperWRT firmware, but I'm not sure if it is possible to do so via a wireless connection. Do you know if this is possible? Are there any other "gotchas" I should look out for? Your advice would be most appreciated.
I *knew* we had a Microsoft troll here somewhere.
Before everyone rushes out to Fry's with their $20.... I feel compelled to share my best friend's Fry's story.
He went there to purchase a hard drive and was sold a brand new drive in original packaging with at a new price.
When he got it home, he installed it ready to format, and lo-and-behold it booted up into Windows!
After some mild snooping, he found Quickbooks files and other documents from the former owner. Being a good person, he found the guy's phone number (among other things) and learned that the guy bought the hard drive about three weeks prior and returned it because it had some bad sectors on it. They assured him that they would destroy it.
-David
Regarding the fear of customer support issues, all they'd really need is a ROM of a stable release and a reset-switch that would re-load the flash from the fixed ROM.
I'd definately buy a wireless router that gives me more flexibility of routing & firewalling than the default GUIs offer.
Any reason why LinkSys (and airlink, and Tivo, etc) don't just openly publish their APIs and how to connect?
A major chain that's actually aware of Lynx?! And apologizes for using frames? This is one of the signs of the Apocalypse, isn't it? OK, so it was probably just the work of one dedicated geek in the IT department, but it's still impressive.