December 2009
So I got an old Linksys WRT54G.
The SN starts with “CDF7”, so according to dslreports it must be a WRT54G v2.2 / BCM5325EKQM Chipset / CPU 200Mhz
. This is consistent with what SpeedGuide says.
Then, according to the Wikipedia page on the Linksys WRT54G series, this version has 16MB of RAM and 4MB flash.
I connect the “Internet” socket to my intranet switch, and one of the other four directly to a Linux PC.
On the Linux box, I do sudo dhclient eth0, and sure enough, the WRT54G answers from 192.168.1.1, giving the Linux box the IP number of 192.168.1.100.
Now I fire up Firefox, and try to browse to http://192.168.1.1.
The administrator username and password have been modified by the previous owner, but holding the reset
button for ten seconds or so solves that.
I log in with a blank username and 'admin' as the password.
I put the MAC address that is on the box in the DHCP config on my DHCP server, and from the WRT54G's Web GUI issue a DHCP renew
.
Now I can ping from the Linux box to hosts on the Internet.
From the OpenWRT site, I fetch the Release Candidate version of Kamikaze for the WRT54G.
I scp it to the Linux box behind the WRT54G, and from the Upgrade Firmware
dialog on the GUI, select the file I just downloaded.
After half a minute or so, the progress bar disappears, I get a "Succesful" message, and the WRT54G reboots. The original URL is gone, and the Linux box cannot ping through the WRT54G any more, but after a sudo dhclient eth0 on the Linux box and a new HTTP GET request to 192.168.1.1, I can ping again, and I'm looking at the OpenWRT web interface.
I can now telnet 192.168.1.1 into the WRT54G and use passwd to set a new password. After that, ssh and the web interface work too, and telnet doesn't any more.