Note: At first blush, it does not appear that OpenWRT supports the 5GHz radio. This is fine for my application, as I have another wireless router.
I've been running OpenBSD as my firewall, but have often had performance problems on the old hardware on which I run it. While searching for an alternative, I decided to revisit possibilities for the Linksys WRT600N wireless router I've had in storage since I replaced it with something with better 5GHz and 802.11n performance. I had been running DD-WRT on it, but maintenance of that release fell by the wayside several years ago.
OpenWRT, on which DD-WRT is reported to be based, appears to have a more active development community. I discovered that version 1.1 of the WRT600N, with serial numbers starting with "MNR0", has been supported since version 14.07 of OpenWRT.
I still had a copy of the original firmware, downloaded from Linksys when they made it easy to find, so I loaded that, replacing the DD-WRT image. I set the load to switch to factory defaults.
The latest version of OpenWRT is distributed in the TRX format, so requires conversion for the stock Linksys firmware to be able to process an update, which must be in BIN format. The OpenWRT ticketing system has a case concerning this and here is a direct link to the conversion tool in base64 format. This tool is a 32-bit x86 Linux executable, so I had to install 32-bit glibc.
The resulting file installed smoothly from the Linksys firmware's update page.
A subsequent post will discuss configuration of features of interest to me.
Could you please post what you uploaded to the linksys page? I'm in the same situation and would like to try OpenWRT. I can't get any of the files to upload to the Linksys page -
ReplyDeleteI'm going to try it on a WRT600n 1.0. The original comments said BCM4705 works, so I'd like to give it a shot.
Do you mean you seek the stock Linksys firmware?
ReplyDelete