Installing OpenWRT Backfire in a fonera 2100

Sometimes pocket money isn’t enought for buy new network devices or we want to save some money changuing no existant money for personal time. In my case I needed to create a wireless bridge in my personal network, pass a ethernet wire between two builds wasn’t an option. Searching in my forgoten stuff boxes i found two foneras model 2100. Fon’s firmware isn’t powerfull enought to get wds and when these things happens Free Software is our solution. A couple of foneras Ready for flashing I’m a lucky man and I also found a usb to 3,3V serial adapter, one of my superpower is that i can brick everything. First of all we need to plug our serial adapter into fonera’s port, check the attached image for see jtag pinouts Fonera pinouts

when we have our jtag port connected we need a software for send data over jtag in my case i use GtkTerm.

in debian is simply I open a root terminal and I write

apt-get install GtkTerm

in the same term i write

gtkterm

I use a root terminal because I don’t want waste time configuring /dev/ttSy* permissions

next step is configure port speed 9600,8N1

in GtkTerm menu select configuration/port and fill data boxes, in my case port is /dev/ttyUSB0 if you don’t know your port a dmesg output can be helpul.

GtkTerm 9600,8N1

now is time to plug powersounce on our fonera and see output.

must be something like this in our gtkterm

Fonera booting

we need get access to redboot console  you only need un plug and plug powersource to fonera and press continously ctrl+c until you see

RedBoot>

we need download ou firmware go to

http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1/atheros/

and download these files

  • openwrt-atheros-vmlinux.lzma
  • openwrt-atheros-root.squashfs
save the files and then we need install tftp server in our machine.

search ftpd config for your distro

Next step will be load files into fonera over tftpd config
in gtkterm we need write
ip_address -h <TFTP SERVER IP ADRESS> -l <ONE FREE IP IN YOUR NETWORK>/24
load -r -b %{FREEMEMLO} openwrt-atheros-vmlinux.lzma
fis init
fis create -e 0x80041000 -r 0x80041000 vmlinux.bin.l7
load -r -b %{FREEMEMLO} openwrt-atheros-root.squashfs
fis create rootfs
reset
if your system doesn’t boot because you have installed dd-wrt before or something similar write this in redboot console:
 fconfig boot_script_data
fis load -l vmlinux.bin.l7
exec
“press enter”
reset
enjoy
sources:

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