I recently went through heroic efforts to bring a dead Linksys WRT54GS router back to life. These routers are great for Broadband Hamnet so I really wanted to get it working, but no dice.
But I don’t want to forget what I did, so I’m documenting it here.
Fix the hardware
The first problem was that the router made a strange buzzing sound. I opened the router and discovered that LX2 in particular, but also LX1 (two chokes at the power supply input) were actually vibrating when I put my finger on them. In addition, the capacitors near it were hot to the touch.
This was described in this post as an electrolytic capacitor problem. Sure enough, when I replaced CX2 with a new 220 uF 25 V electrolytic capacitor, the device settled down. At this point, the power LED was flashing (a bad sign) but at least it was now flashing at a regular speed. While I was soldering, I took the time to add a 12-pin header to the router’s JTAG port.
Reflash the Firmware
Following the unbrick article here, I wasn’t able to ping the router. No matter what, I’d get “destination host unreachable” - even though my IP was the same as the router, ostensibly. So I figured flashing was required.
I started out by trying to get a SEGGER J-Link talking to the JTAG port. I used the pinouts for the WRT54G described here for the WRT54GS, and the pinouts for the J-Link described here. Note that RESET on the J-Link is nSRST on the WRT54GS.
After I’d done that, I wasn’t able to get the J-Link talking. It looks as if the J-Link software wants to talk only to devices it knows about - or at least, that’s all I could figure out about it. Trying to set it to MIPS mode to impersonate EJTAG didn’t yield any success either.
So it was time for a different option. I didn’t have a parallel port handy, but I did have a Raspberry Pi. And a wonderful individual has taken the time to port tjtag to the Raspberry Pi. I cloned the Git repo to my Pi and built it. I had to use:
git clone git://github.com/oxplot/tjtag-pi.git
to grab the Git repo, since https wants an auth key and I don’t have one. After that I followed the Setup instructions and got tjtag built.
I connected things up as described in the wiring diagram, and had success! I was able to probe the router. (I had to run sudo ./tjtag -probeonly instead of just ./tjtag.)
Then I went off to the tjtag instructions here. The first few times I did:
sudo ./tjtag -backup:cfe
I got different results. It appears that tjtag on the Pi spends so much time sending output to the console that it messes up its timing. So I redirected the output to /dev/null, and after that I got consistent backups.
Once I had an nvram backup, I tried erasing the nvram:
sudo ./tjtag -erase:nvram
This worked, but didn’t solve my problem. So I thought I might have had a corrupted CFE. I located the CFE for my router here and modified it to have my IP addresses using imgtool_nvram. I used the following command:
imgtool_nvram.exe wrt54gs1.0-CFE.
BIN et0macaddr=00:11:22:33:44:55 il0macaddr=00:11:22:33:44:56
(substituting my real MAC address and one higher than it.) Then I dumped that back on the Pi as CFE.BIN, and did:
sudo ./tjtag -flash:cfe > /tmp/out
That worked, but still no joy in Mudville after I did the flash. No matter what, when I pinged I got destination unreachable. I wondered if it was Windows messing with me, so I booted to Kali to see what happened there. Still no dice.
Finally, I thought it might be a bad kernel, so I nuked it:
sudo ./tjtag -erase:kernel
Even with that, the router’s still not responding. Other than re-reflashing the CFE on the assumption that the bad kernel corrupted it, I’m out of ideas.
Drat, I thought I had it when I saw the instructions about setting the address with arp. (arp -s 192.168.1.1 aa-bb-cc-dd-ee-ff if you’re on Windows.) But even when I did that (using the MAC address that I flashed), I still had nothing. I even stuffed Wireshark on the end to listen for any packets. He’s dead, Jim.