Sunday, November 25, 2007

Openwrt 7.09 on La Fonera 2100

I spent some time of my thanksgiving holiday on getting my La fonera flashed with openwrt. Reason is it's almost completely useless for the last year as a hotspot. Reason is that the wireless will freeze and fail; not allowing anyone to connect and access the internet. Funny thing is I got an fon email invitation on friday with a coupon code for a free fonera so I'm going use that to replace my old one. Hopefully it works better than my last one.

I was having alot of problems with the installation. I was using partial directions from http://www.mcgrewsecurity.com/blog/?p=28 to install 7.09 on La Fonera. I already enabled ssh used http://stefans.datenbruch.de/lafonera/ (use dns server technique) If anyone reads this and avoids some of my problems that would be great.

1)I used xampp as a webserver to get the files to install into the lafonera. It worked like a champ till it went into redboot and somehow would not serve the files openwrt-atheros-2.6-vmlinux.lzma and openwrt-atheros-2.6-root.jffs2-64k.

2)I than tried solarwinds tftp which also gave me problems. I'm reminded it also gave me problems when I unslung my linksys nslu2. For whatever reasons it will not server the files.

3)I searched online and found tftpd32.303 which finally worked. I spent over an hour wondering why I couldn't load the files using xampp and solarwinds tftp because it kept getting stuck on the prompt when issuing the command and did not connection time out till I press another key so a few hours went by as I thought it took so long. For the record only the fis create command takes a long time which is around 20 minutes.

4)The above was the greatest hurdle but after following directions at http://www.mcgrewsecurity.com/blog/?p=28 I was hit with an insufficient memory listed so I restarted the process with the corrected commands.

5)I read http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Fon/Fonera linked from http://www.mcgrewsecurity.com/blog/?p=28 and was stupid enough not to setup wireless before following directions in the section "Use LAN as WAN port (with NAT)". Completely locked myself out and so went back to redboot redirections and started again.

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