Hacking, Flashing, Routing, Bridging, And More Fun Covertly Installing Gizmos At the Parents’ House (Part 2)
Quick-hitters:
- Is it just me, or are those Mac v PC commercials getting exponentially stupider?
Actually, I’m almost certain it’s not just me.
(You can tack on that stupid Mentos commercial, where the guy chews a piece of Mentos gum, and a girl comes up to him and drinks out of his mouth, as if he were a water dispenser. Yeah, because THAT makes me want to buy Mentos gum.
- Current rebate-o-meter: $1,244! And half of that is currently unfiled rebates!
Time to go on a shopping spree 
- Quick NBA playoff thoughts:
1) David West is completely unguardable. The Spurs might win Game Six, but I don’t see any way the Spurs are going to beat the Hornets in Game Seven.
(Well, I can see one way: if Chandler and West aren’t 100% for the next two games, the Spurs have a shot.)
2) Orlando had two shots to win a game against the Chauncey Billups-less Pistons, and they couldn’t win one (and one was at home, no less!). Maybe Pat Riley will take over the Magic midway through next season.
Detroit’s gonna get a ton of rest, but I think that the Cavs-Celtics winner will be the Eastern Conference representative in the NBA Finals.
- Time for part 2 of my covert ops mission.
So after a bit of begging on the Slickdeals forum, I got an invite to purchase a Fonera from fon.com. I used this guide to assist me in hacking the Fonera.
(Tangent: Dammit! I didn’t realize that all the steps were compiled on to one web page! I had to print out four different web pages! Bah!)
As soon as I got the Fonera, I found that it came DOA! Argh. I contacted Fon CS, and they quickly sent me out another Fonera, which came in working condition. I decided to wait until the next time I was going to visit my parents to hack the Fonera. A week or so later (whenever I actually got around to visiting the parents again :P), I began preparation for the installation. I made sure to bring home the LF-B10, the Fonera, a spare router, and all cables that I needed.
Sure enough, I managed to forget a couple things! I decided to go ahead and hack the Fonera anyway, just to make sure that the Fonera would work as a wireless bridge. Unfortunately for me, I made the stupid decision of trying this at midnight.
(You see, the router and DSL modem are in my sister’s room, and she’s asleep early, meaning I would have to be hacking the Fonera pretty much in the dark. Browse through the fonera hacking guide, and you could see how I could easily make a mistake.)
I started out by plugging in my spare router, and connecting my laptop and Fonera to it via Ethernet cables. I got to step 4 of the first part of the tutorial, but could not get the Fonera firmware to downgrade to 0.7.1 r1. For the life of me, I could not figure out what the hell went wrong.
(If you haven’t figured it out by now, apparently I missed a key part of the tutorial: the hack requires the router to actually be connected to the internet! Fifty bazillion stupid points for that one.)
I grabbed my laptop, the Fonera, and the Ethernet cables, and hooked them all up to my main router, and began the process again. When I got back to step 4, I held down the reset button on the Fonera, and logged in to it (http://192.168.1.1), and was dismayed to see the wrong firmware version (0.7.0 r2, I believe)!
I looked over the guide, re-checked everything, and after two or three additional tries, I finally got the correct firmware version! W00t! I went ahead with the next step, hit submit, and was indeed redirected back to the Fonera.
I got to step 7, enabled SSH permanently, and began the process to enable Redboot (part 2). I got to step 10, and attempted to reconnect to the Fonera via SSH. That’s when I got a “Network refused” error. Grrrrrr. Immediately I thought that step 7 didn’t take, so I attempted to re-open SSH permanently again, starting from step 5. I ran the script again, and it appeared that the Fonera threw up all over itself. I got a ton of “invalid blah blah blah” errors, and I started pulling out my hair.
Unsure of what happened, I decided to start all over from the beginning. When I got to step 5 again, the Fonera threw up all over itself once again. Worse, I noticed that the firmware on the Fonera was 0.7.0 r2 again!
On a whim, I attempted to SSH into the Fonera again, and it worked! I entered the command to open SSH permanently again, and then I proceeded with step 10. I was hesitant to do this, though, as I couldn’t get the Fonera to downgrade to the “correct” firmware (0.7.1 r1, as directed in the guide).
Step 10 went to completion, and I attempted to access Redboot. For some reason, it was not working, and I immediately thought I bricked the Fonera. That’s when I read the instructions carefully, especially the blurb before step 11:
Make sure the Fonera is powered off. You also need to make sure you have a wired connection to the Fonera and an IP address in the 192.168.1.x range.
Again, it was late and dark. Never again will I hack anything late at night, I told myself. You will see later on, though, that I did not adhere to this
At first, I could not get into Redboot. It took me fifteen minutes to realize where I screwed up this time: step 12 says to ” Open putty and enter in “192.168.1.254″ for the IP address and “9000″ as the port number.” It says nothing about changing the connection type to Telnet (as the image states)!
I finally managed to get into Redboot, and prepared for the flashing process. I will neither confirm nor deny that I said a non-denominational prayer or ten at this point.
Each step, from 15-18, took me a while, because I was carefully typing in each character, triple-checking to make sure that I didn’t make a typo. It was eventually brought to my attention (from another guide I was reading) that I could paste commands into PuTTy simply by right-clicking! Bah!
According to the tutorial, step 19 was supposed to take about 10-20 minutes. I got really worried when that step only took about six minutes; I was almost certain that something went wrong at this point. Step 21 also took only a few minutes, and the final step only took a few moments. When step 22 finished, I could not bear to look at my screen as I rebooted the Fonera.
Once the reboot completed, I peered over at my screen, and was dismayed to not see the “dd-wrt” network available. I cilcked “refresh network list,” scrolled down the list S L O W L Y, and almost paraded around the room when the dd-wrt network finally appeared!
Much thanks to Krunk for assisting me throughout the hacking process, as well as setting up the hacked Fonera as a client bridge.
Part 3, including more hacking, to come another time!