Comments on: Installing OpenWRT On The GT-704WG

By: Bobby

Bobby — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 03:32:38 +0000

This command did the trick…

quote SETENV mtd5,0×90010000,0x903e0000

and this…

put “openwrt-ar7-squashfs.bin” “openwrt-ar7-squashfs.bin mtd5”

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:45:49 +0000

I was finally able to get OpenWRT flashed to my GT-704WG. From monitoring the serial console I was able to determine that the FTP transfer would start at a good speed, but then slow to a crawl. Sometimes it would transfer quite a bit before it slowed down (evidenced by many dots on the console showing progress of the flash process). By using “dm” to see how far the flash had made it before slowing down I was able to break up my transfer, starting the next stage after the last chunk that was already in flash. I created a new mtd6 variable using “setenv” and gave it a range beginning where the transfer had ended (rounded down to the prior block boundary, i.e. 0x90XX0000), then rebooted the router into adam2 and restarted the FTP connection. I would then put the remaining chuck of the openwrt image using ‘put openwrt-partx.bin “fs mtd6″‘, and see how far that made it. If I didn’t get at least 4 dots before it slowed down, I would reboot the router and try again. After many restarts and a total of 5 seperate uploads the last chunk made it to the router. I then cleaned up the mtd6 variable and rebooted the router, and OpenWRT came up.

Whew!

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:47:39 +0000

I’m seeing the same issues as John. Over FTP the STOR command returns the “550 Data Socket not ready” response. Using PUT results in a REALLY slow transfer, even if I ensure that PASSIVE is turned off before the PUT command.

On a serial console I can see that a section of the flash is erased immediately after the PUT command is issued. When the erase completes, the FTP client shows that the binary transfer started. I can also use “dm” from the serial console to see how much of the mtd5 memory area has been written so far, and it goes very, very slowly.

Based on some settings I found in one of the update tools available on the web I used the serial console to “setenv StaticBuffer 128″, which seemed to speed things up quite a bit, but it still looks like it would take several days to finish.

What FTP clients have been used successfully to use the STOR command?

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:49:05 +0000

Your FTP client is likely going into passive mode by default; adam2, for whatever reason, doesn’t like this. Make sure your FTP client is not in passive mode before you upload the file to adam2.

Also, I noticed that the local file names you used for the STOR and PUT commands were different; try using the STOR command, but instead of “openwrt-ar7-squashfs.bin”, use “openwrt-ar7-2.4-squashfs.bin” (or whatever the file is named on your hard drive). The STOR command *should* work.

By: John

John — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:42:27 +0000

In case I confused anyone, I did use mtd5 in the put command and not mtdX

By: John

John — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:41:15 +0000

Hopefully someone can help me out on this…

I was trying to put OpenWRT on my GT704WG router. I’ve never tried hacking a router before, so I’m new to all this, but this was an extra one lying around, so I don’t really care if I brick it.

I was following the steps in the blog post, but I left out:

quote SETENV MAC_PORT,0

So I started over, running that command this time, and when I got to:

quote STOR openwrt-ar7-squashfs.bin mtd5

it gave me an error:

550 Data Socket not ready.

So I tried the command listed in the 701WG’s instructions on openwrt.org:

put “openwrt-ar7-2.4-squashfs.bin” “openwrt-ar7-2.4-squashfs.bin mtdX”

Now the response I got was:
200 Port command successful
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for file transfer

And it just hung there. I quit the transfer several hours later, and it said about 100K had been transfered, which I’m guessing means it was in passive mode according to the blog – although I’m not sure what that means.

I’ve tried many times now to see if I could get this to work, and now, I’m convinced it’s beyond hope. But I can still access the adam2 bootloader, so if anyone has any ideas for me to try, I’m all ears. Thanks.

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:40:28 +0000

Thanks Bobby! It actually wasn’t very difficult, so I’m looking at working on a couple other ActionTec routers in the near future.

By: Bobby

Bobby — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:27:02 +0000

Final, Somebody did it!!!!

Great work!