Flashing FON to some other firmwares
After taking CS2106 – Operating Systems under Hugh Anderson. I have became very interested in embedded systems that runs on opensource. The La Fonera cant escape from its evil fate as well.
The La Fonera router has been hooked to my network for less than an hour and it had its firmware changed. I had 2 choice – OpenWRT Kamikaze or DD-WRT. The former has more IPKG support but there is no webif for it (currently) while the latter has got webif but broken IPKG. My choice? DD-WRT. Reason for it? With just 16mb onboard the device, I doubt I will be installing much packages on it. So for a start try DD-WRT. With DD-WRT, the amount of free ram hovers around 1MB. Pretty low as compared to my WRT54G and WRT54GS.
# cat /proc/cpuinfo
system type : Atheros AR5315processor : 0
cpu model : MIPS 4KEc V6.4
BogoMIPS : 183.29
wait instruction : yes
microsecond timers : yes
tlb_entries : 16
extra interrupt vector : yes
hardware watchpoint : no
ASEs implemented :
VCED exceptions : not available
VCEI exceptions : not available
# cat /proc/meminfo | grep ^Mem
Mem: 13950976 12906496 1044480 0 1597440 4861952
MemTotal: 13624 kB
MemFree: 1020 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Interested to flash your La Fonera to DD-WRT or OpenWRT as well? Flashing it isn’t really a difficult task as there are guides floating around. But then, please ensure that you continue to share your WiFi by using Chillispot. You can actually configure it to authenticate using FON backend system.
Common misconception is that you would need a RS232-to-TTL convertor to flash your device. Well, you don’t. Having that will only make your flashing safer if anything goes wrong. For those who are comfortable tapping commands away in a black window, the flashing process is relatively easy (as long as you follow the steps).
Stuffs needed are:
* SSH access to the router (which you can open through html injection)
* Setting up a TFTP server to host the required files for flashing
* Connecting to the RedBoot of the device
* Flashing procedures
Since there are already so many guides floating around on the flashing. I won’t elaborate on that. But I would say that once you are comfortable with RedBoot, you are pretty safe. Unless you messed up the settings for RedBoot then you might need the RS232-to-TTL convertor to access RedBoot.
Have fun with your FON!