codercotton

I was having issues with my Linksys WRT54G Ver. 6 router, and the Linksys forums definitely show others with the same problem. Obviously a firmware flaw at fault - no matter what combination of settings it just would not allow any PPTP VPN connections through. It would just hang at the authentication stage, blah.

Well, fsck that. I have heard of running Linux on Linksys, but never had a compatible router to test with. It turned out to be very straight-forward, so I decided I’d put together a quick and to-the-point how-to. This is for the WRT54G Vers. 6, 5.1 and 5 only, NOT the GS… don’t brick your router. You will also need to set the IP address of the computer to something in the 192.168.1 subnet (ie, 192.168.1.2) with 192.168.1.1 as the gateway. That said, lets get down to business.

1. Download vxworks_prep, vxworks_killer and DD-WRT. Unzip the first 2 files.
2. Point your web browser to your router, default is http://192.168.1.1. Click the ‘Administration’ tab up top, then click ‘Firmware Upgrade’. On this page, click browse and choose the vxworks_prep_v03.bin, then click ‘Apply’.
3. After a minute, your browser will go blank. Power cycle your router.
4. Go to http://192.168.1.1 again, this time you will see a different firmware upgrade screen. This time, choose vxworks_killer_g_v06.bin, and click ‘Apply’.
5. Wait for the ‘Success’ message! Again, power cycle your router. The power LED should stay blinking at this point.
6. Now we have to TFTP over the Linux distro, flashing it to the firmware.
   • Windows users, download the Linksys TFTP tool, put ‘192.168.1.1′ in the Server field, then click ‘…’ on the right side to browse for file, and choose your dd-wrt.v23_micro_generic.bin file, then click upgrade.
   • Mac OS X users can use the cli TFTP tool:
     • Open the Terminal application, then cd to the directory where you have the dd-wrt.v23_micro_generic.bin file.
     • Type ‘tftp’ and press enter
     • Inside the TFTP shell, type ‘connect 192.168.1.1′ and press enter. Next, type ‘binary’ and press enter to switch to binary mode, then ‘put dd-wrt.v23_micro_generic.bin’.
     • q or ctrl+d gets out of TFTP
7. After the TFTP transfer completes, it will take 2 or 3 minutes for the router to flash the ROM and reboot. Once you have a stable power light, you should be able to log into your new DD-WRT Linux router at http://192.168.1.1 with the username ‘root’ and the password ‘admin’.

You will have all the same options plus tons more functionality and for me, a better-running router that actually lets me VPN. There has been tons of work put into this project, the DD-WRT guys deserve much praise.

-Cotton