ramblings

I had a spare Aztech DSL605EW which was laying about. So I got to trying out firmware routertech.org (some brilliant minds and great resources.) Eventually I managed to “brick” the router, i.e., the lights on the front panel would turn on when the router was powered up, do its usual initialization dance, but the PC would not get an IP address. WiFi SSID was visible, but I did not have the WEP key to connect to it. I realized I must have used a version of the firmware that was not able to handle the 1350A ethernet switch.

Next tried Adam2App.exe to connect to the bootloader, it connected after some attempts to get the timing right (I figured i need to click on the “Retrieve/Assign IP Address” button exactly at the 9th second after router powerup to connect consistently everytime.) I was then able to load the correct firmware on the router and I was then able to connect to the web interface. I then discovered that the RouterTech firmware only allowed ADSL as the WAN connection interface. The Internet connectivity to home is Ethernet over GPON, this meant that I would not be able to use this router at home if I ever wanted to.

When I discussed my dilemma with Troy, he volunteered to lend me his Aztech 605EW with the firmware that allowed Port4 of the Ethernet switch to be used as a WAN interface. So, now it was time to extract the firmware from Troy’s router. After some poking around here’s what I did to extract the firmware:

1. Started up a TFTP Server on my PC ( I used TFTPD32 by Ph. Jounin http://tftpd32.jounin.net/tftpd32_download.html)

2. Connected up my PC (Manually configured IP Address : 192.168.1.21) and the router and telneted to the router (default UserID : root Password : admin)

BusyBox on localhost login: root
Password:
DSL Modem CLI
Copyright (c) 2004 Texas Instruments, Inc.
cli> shell

Starting /bin/sh
Type exit to return to the CLI

BusyBox v0.61.pre (2009.04.08-03:17+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
# cd /var/tmp
# cat /dev/mtdblock/4 > TroysFirmware.bin
# tftp -p -l TroysFirmware.bin 192.168.1.21
#

Now that the firmware was on my PC, I tried loading the dumped firmware using the web interface of my router. It aborted with a checksum failed error message, not entirely unexpected ;-). The only choice was to try and load this firmware using the bootloader interface. Back to the the Adam2App to connect to the bootloader selected the relevant settings (indicated by the arrows in the screenshot below) and used the “Download” button to select the firmware extracted earlier. A few minutes later it was up and running!