Category: Computing

How To: DD-WRT on the Netgear WNR3500L

I’ve been a fan of DD-WRT for some time, a Linksys WRT54GL is the heart of my home network. While I don’t have an immediate need for a new router, I’ve been thinking for some time that I should pick up a reasonable backup in case the WRT54GL fails. There are also some really interesting projects you can do with a modified router, and having a spare will let me tinker with some of those.

I came across a good deal on a refurbished Netgear WNR3500L, it was about half the price of a new unit. This was too tempting: N networking (I don’t really need it, but why not stay current?), gigabit wired networking (a must have), USB port (I wanted this for expansion options), but the feature that really sold me was 64MB RAM and 8MB ROM – more than enough for DD-WRT with all the features.

This particular router is also supported by Tomato another very popular firmware. There is also a somewhat suspect Netgear sponsored open firmware, the site seems to have instructions for installing an older version of Tomato – personally I’d steer clear of this. Unfortunately the other popular router firmware OpenWRT doesn’t currently support this router. Of course, I prefer DD-WRT which does support this router.

One of the reasons that I blog is to have a record of what I did, far too often I end up needing to do something again, or refer back when I’m doing an upgrade. Another reason is to help me get organized to do some of these things – finding the instructions is usually easy, understanding them and what you’re about to do takes some time. I probably spent 2hrs reading through forums and searching various things before I leapt in to flash the router, I strongly recommend you do the same. Also this write-up skips over some of the frustrating head scratching I do when things don’t work, that’s part of the learning process.

There is a v2 of this router, and v2 is NOT supported by DD-WRT. Apparently the boxes they come in are identical, but the router itself has a v2 marking. I did find a wiki that documents the v1 and the v2, I was able to match the FCC numbers listed to confirm I had a v1. For what it’s worth, my stock firmware was V1.0.2.50_31.1.25NA.

The DD-WRT site has some excellent instructions on doing the installation, I’ll avoid repeating those but will document the steps I took. I will repeat some of the cautions from the site:

  • The WNR3500L requires a NEWD-2, K2.6 build of DD-WRT
  • You will first need to upload a special .chk build (also K2.6) of DD-WRT to the router to go from Netgear’s factory firmware. Then you may install a .bin build of DD-WRT.
  • Spend some time browsing the DD-WRT Forums. There’s a lot of chaotic information to ingest.
  • Read the peacock thread.

Before we get started, let’s talk about the 30/30/30 reset. Yes, it’s over the top and very conservative. Weigh those 90 seconds against the potential problems you might run into trying to by rushing through this, sure building a JTAG connector to resurrect a bricked router might be interesting but it’s going to take you a lot more than 90 seconds.

The following steps should not be considered an alternate installation procedure, please use the official DD-WRT instructions – consider this a walk through of the official instructions:

  1. Power on the device. Give it a minute to finish booting, the front panel LEDs should stabilize.
  2. Plug in your linux box, it’ll automatically get an IP address (192.168.1.2)
  3. Perform a 30/30/30 reset
    a) With unit powered on, press and hold the reset button for 30s
    b) Without releasing the reset button, unplug the router, wait 30s
    c) Still holding the reset button, plug the router in and wait 30s
  4. Now wait for the PC to get an IP address assigned to it, this may take a minute or two be patient.
  5. As I’m using Linux Firefox will be the browser of choice
    Connect to 192.168.1.1
    user: admin
    password: password
    (the default user and password)
  6. Since the router isn’t connected to anything except my PC the automatic upgrade process will fail due to no internet connection, that’s fine.
  7. Click on “Router Upgrade” in the menu on the left side.
  8. Choose the .chk file you downloaded as per the DD-WRT site
  9. You will get a warning: “Warning! You are trying to download the firmware which the region is different from the current firmware you had.” – this is ok, continue.
  10. Wait for the upload process to complete.
    Once the upload is done, it will automatically move on to updating settings.
    A minute or so more it will show a DD-WRT screen.
  11. Start a timer for 5 minutes and wait. Yes, likely paranoid as we could have probably started the timer when we started the upload process, but again this isn’t something you really want to rush. Time for coffee.
  12. At this point we’re running DD-WRT, just not the version we want.
  13. Do another 30/30/30 reset
  14. It took my system about 2 minutes to get an IP address (192.168.1.101)
  15. DD-WRT will force us to set a username and password, for now I suggest the same as stock.
  16. Click on the Administration tab, followed by the Firmware Upgrade sub-tab.
  17. I set ‘After flashing, reset to’ ->  “Reset to Default settings”
    Pick the big file you downloaded as per the DD-WRT site.
  18. It will flip to a reset screen once the firmware has been installed
  19. Wait 5 minutes. If you’re really paranoid perform another 30/30/30 reset after that.
  20. Done. Configure your new router.

I primarily use Chrome, but have experienced problems with DD-WRT and Chrome in the past. It turns out this time that FireFox was unable to configure the router (but it did handle the firmware install just fine). Consider this a caution, if you’re having trouble with this process it might be your browser.

Creating DVD Videos with Ubuntu

There are many different ways to take some video on Ubuntu and convert it to a physical DVD that will play back on most DVD players and while the command line would be fine, it’s certainly nice to see there is at least one option that provides a reasonable GUI and supports the creation of menus.

I tried DeVeDe before coming across Bombono. I was trying to take a number of 15 and 30 minute recorded children’s shows stored as mp4’s and convert them into a playable DVD. For some reason DeVeDe aborted with little to no diagnostic information after a couple of videos, it was easier to move on than mess with it.

Bombono was able to convert all of my videos, but the version available in the Ubuntu repository was older and had some serious issues related to menu editing. It turns out there is a PPA that is current (1.2.1), instructions for installing via the PPA are hosted on the bombono wiki. I expect in future the Ubuntu repository version will catch up and be the easiest way to get this utility, but in the near future I recommend getting it from the PPA.

The PPA install places things in the /opt/bombono-dvd-testing hierarchy, which is fine but it doesn’t provide an easy way to run it. I added a link in /usr/local/bin so that I can launch it from the command line

$sudo ln -s /opt/bombono-dvd-testing/bin/bombono-dvd /usr/local/bin/bombono-dvd

It does appear that there is a .desktop file in /opt/bombono-dvd-testing/share/applications so a little creativity and I’m sure you could easily integrate it into the Ubuntu menu system.

The 1.2.1 version (via the PPA) has quite nice menu editing. I wouldn’t claim this is the same level you’d expect on a Mac, but it very easy to use. One of the more polished utilities I’ve seen on Linux. Menus support background images and buttons that can be stills or motion video clips. I did experience problems trying to use too many motion clips on a single menu (it rendered most of them as stills), it may be possible to work around this by generating the DVD folder then manually adding the appropriate video clips. The alignment and snap to grid tools are handy for making the menu line up.

You of course can choose to create a DVD without a menu. Simply omit any menu and the DVD will play the video when the disk is inserted.

Before you get going with Bombono, make sure you use the Project menu and select Preferences, you’ll want to choose NTSC or PAL as appropriate and choose how many cores for it to use.

The size estimation is terrible, a 4.4GB estimate (with warning it wouldn’t fit) resulted in 3.3GB iso. This is a bit frustrating if you’re trying to maximize the quality of a full length movie on a single layer DVD (then again, if you’re burning a 2hr movie to a single layer DVD you’ve already made a number of compromises). There is an option to create dual layer DVDs, but I didn’t try this out. It appears to create 16:9 animorphic DVDs just fine, but either mixed 4:3 content (or possibly 4:3 content in general) ends up stretched.

I’ll include a reference to the forum, but it does seem fairly quiet there.

Windows Vista Recovery

Like many geeks, I’m the family tech support. Somehow my nephew’s Windows Vista laptop had stopped booting. You’d get the blue screen of death (BSoD) on boot. Using F8 on boot also resulted in a BSoD. I even tried using a Vista recovery disk and it too crashed and burned in the same way.

My first thought was to check that the hardware was ok. Running some diagnostics from an Ubuntu live CD indicated that side of things looked fine.

So I tracked down the Vista Install disks, maybe I’d need to do a full re-install or at least it’d give me a way to move forward. What? Another BSoD?! This time instead of ignoring the data on the BSoD I wrote some of it down, it the main error code was: 0x0000C1F5. Searching for this turns up the specific problem, there is even a Microsoft knowledge base article. Of course the fix that is supplied by Microsoft won’t help you until you can actually boot Vista again.

I though I could solve the issue using Linux as was described in one of the forums. While I could easily boot Linux and poke around, there was no sign of a $TxfLog log file. I suspect in this particular case there was some other file that was corrupted, but which one? A bit more digging around and I found another Microsoft knowledge base article.

This ended up being the solution: Windows 7 knows how to recover from this type of filesystem corruption. The knowledge base article suggests that you use a Windows 7 Beta installation disk – I wasn’t able to find one of these. What I did find was some Windows 7 recovery images, these will work for what we need to do.

Burn the image to a CD or DVD. Boot the Windows 7 Recovery disk to the point where it’s going to try to recover, now shut down and cancel the recovery. The Windows 7 Recovery disk should have repaired the Vista filesystem so we can now boot from the hard drive into recovery mode and the system will perform it’s “self repair” fixing things up.

So while the BSoD screen can be intimidating, taking a bit of time to read the screen and take note of some of the magic numbers can help guide you to the right solution. Or just call up the geek in your family and get them to fix it.