Hacking, Flashing, Routing, Bridging, And More Fun Covertly Installing Gizmos At the Parents’ House (Part 3)
I’m topic-less today, so finally, here comes part 3 of my covert ops mission 
Quick-hitters:
- Is the Wii Fit the 2008 version of the Gym Membership (the gift that is followed by a swift kick to the groin)?
Just wondering…
- Some more quick Celts-Lakers reax before Game Two.
1) I’ve heard more than enough about the Boston myopians comparing Pierce’s injury-and-return to that of Willis Reed. Please! It was a memorable moment, but let’s not get carried away now.
And enough with Laker myopians calling Pierce a faker. I don’t buy that either. Yeah, like Pierce decided to fake an injury, watch his team play for a couple of minutes without him, and then energize the entire arena with his return. And Kirk Gibson did the same thing in 1988, right?
2) I’ve been thinking this over for the past two days: should the loser of the Finals declare the season a failure? You always hear that teams are only playing for a championship (true), and that anything short of that is a failure. But seriously (and this has been stated eleventy billion times already, I know), who had Boston and LA in the Finals a year ago at this time?
I’m actually looking forward to next season. Boston’s Big Three will get another year of playing time together, and the Lakers, hopefully, will get to trot out a front line of Odom-Gasol-Bynum for a full season. Awesome.
- Time for part 3 of my covert ops mission!
So after hacking the Fonera, I was ready to set up the Sony LocationFree LF-B10 on my mom’s entertainment center, when I thought to myself, “That Trendnet POS router I have at home is probably not going to be stable enough to handle the added stress that the LF-B10 is going to put on it!”
A week later, I found out that Staples was selling a Linksys WRT54GS router for $29.99, no rebates. Knowing full well that this particular router could be flashed with DD-WRT firmware, I decided to order one.
(After a coupon and some free after rebate software, as well as sales tax, the router cost me about $13. I figured that was a much better buy than $50 for the WRT54GL, which would have definitely run DD-WRT.)
Using this guide from the DD-WRT forum, I began preparing for the hack. I got to step five, where I got stuck. Unfortunately, I ran into a bit of a problem; I could not download the Linksys TFTP utility!
(Tangent: Remember when I typed this?
Don’t you hate it when you need a critical piece of data or an application to do something, and the site hosting said file just happens to be down?
That happened to me TWICE this past weekend. I’ll recap what happened in a later blog entry.
Now you know what I was talking about.)
(Tangent #2: Naturally, the download works now. Sigh…)
I decided to go ahead with the hack, hoping that I could download the TFTP utility later. After flashing the WRT54GS with the VxWorks killer firmware, I patiently waited for the Linksys FTP site to allow me to download their utility.
Thirty minutes later, I decided to research an alternate way to get the DD-WRT firmware on the WRT54GS. After a bit of Googling, I stumbled upon the necessary TFTP command to use at the Windows Command Prompt:
TFTP -i 192.168.1.1 PUT [name of firmware]
Once the transfer was done, I waited for the WLAN light to turn on. Five minutes later, it turned on! When I tried to access the router, though, I got the dreaded “This page cannot be displayed” error. Argh!
Several minutes, a couple network connection repairs, a power cycle of the WRT54GS, and a couple checks of the ethernet cable later, and I was finally able to access the newly-flashed WRT54GS. Hooray!
The next day, I replaced the junky Trendnet router with the WRT54GS, and constantly pissed off my siblings by throwing them offline several times, while I made adjustments to the router.
(Note to self: Do EVERYTHING late at night from now on!)
As for the router itself, I still have a couple of minor issues that I haven’t quite been able to iron out yet. For some reason, my sister’s laptop and my own can’t connect wirelessly to the WRT54GS unless I use the wireless card’s software (not the Wireless Zero Config tool built in to Windows XP). Also, for a while, my sister’s laptop could not connect to the wireless network on startup automatically; I would have to open the Intel wireless card tool and manually refresh the network to get it to work. That problem eventually went away after a while (as some computer problems are apt to do). I was also having trouble using WPA+PSK security on the WRT54GS; for now, my home network is stuck using WEP.
(That is NOT an invite to try to hack into my network at home :P)
Later in the day, I had an opening to install the Fonera and the LF-B10 onto my mom’s entertainment center. That’s when I realized I forgot to bring an extra composite cable! Half an hour (and $3 at the local discount store) later, I had everything I needed, and setup was a breeze. I tucked the Fonera behind my mom’s TV, and the LF-B10 was installed on an empty shelf at the bottom of her entertainment center.
While finishing up, my mom walked in on my install and asked about the “black box” sitting on her entertainment center. I simply told her that it was important to be there, and she took a cursory look at the box, uttered “I don’t like it there,” and walked out.
(It’s still sitting there to this day :P).
The LF-B10 works decently well; video streams get choppy on occasion, and I’m not completely sure from which end the problem is originating. The audio stream is nearly perfect, though.
(EDIT: I have not been able to connect to the LF-B10 for the last 2-3 days. Hopefully my mom didn’t get so upset with my not moving it that she unplugged the damn thing!)
Until next time!