WRT54G revision 5 DD-WRT firmware upgrade

 What an adventure this was!  After experiencing problems with my router I decided to update the firmware and ran into the wall multiple times.  Somehow it is now working again and things are back to normal.  It wasn't pretty but hopefully this article can help you accomplish your own dd-wrt upgrade.

First I have to say that the router I was working on had already been converted over to a DD-WRT installation.  That means I did not have to run the vxworks prep and vxworks killer so it should have been a slam dunk.  If you are wanting more information on how to install dd-wrt for the first time I would suggest looking HERE or HERE.   I ran into some differences in the new version that left me stumped and scrambling to develop a workaround.   

The router I have is a WRT54G revision 5 (which sucks due to hardware memory limitations).  The 5th revision was developed by Linksys in an attempt to thwarte all the people who were installing OpenWRT and unlocking features that were usually only found in high end networking equiptment.  Along with OpenWRT came other projects such as DD-WRT .  The hardware on the v5 router had been halved from 16MB down to 8.  This successfully kept people from running the router based linux installations on cheap Linksys hardware.  After a short while with demand came the supply and once again the WRT54G was reclaimed.  So about a year and a half ago or more I decided one weekend that I wanted to flash my linksys router to run this alternate firmware. 

 After reading page upon page of tutorials on how to do this without bricking the router I cruised over to the dd-wrt homepage and downloaded the dd-wrt.v23_micro_generic.bin file.  I also ran the vxkiller and vxprep files prior to installing this new bin file full of firmware goodness.  Shazam!  After running the firmware update, bringing up the router webpage, and googling up the default username and password for dd-wrt I was in!  Looking around it seemed like the same basic thing with a few extra options such as how many meters I want the antennas to broadcast and stuff like that.  For the most part it was very similar to the way the router previously operated.  Now enter dd-wrt.v24_micro_generic.bin and say hello to my headaches.

After resetting the router so I could login with the default username and password I went to the administration tab and clicked on firmware update.  I then browsed my drive for the bin file that I had downloaded from the dd-wrt homepage and hit upload.  A few minutes later I was logging into the spiffy new version of firmware jam packed full of features.  Then things started going downhill......

 Setting up personal routers is a simple process.  You choose your wan ip setup (dynamic/static) and then setup your internal network and dhcp server.  Usually this process takes only a few minutes and your up and running.  HOWEVER, with this new version of the firmware I found myself struggling to get the simple functionality of routing activated on my home network.  Due to a double nat setup I have to statically assign the wan ip to a private ip address and the internal lan ip to a different private ip range.  Then I set the dhcp server to run on the internal lan scope so it hands out ip addresses to all the client machines that connect to it.  Very simple setup, another router connects to the net and routes the routers wan port across the internet.  The router in turn routes internal lan to it's wan and life is good.  Not really the case when it comes to this latest release of dd-wrt v24 sp1.  

I attempted to setup the wan static ip and then proceeded with setting up the internal lan and dhcp server.  That was easy, but it didn't work.  In fact, there are now so many options included with this release that I was lost.  No matter how hard I tried I could not get connected to the upstream router.  The linksys was not routing anything across the wan link.  In fact, stumbling through all the pages in the web based administration interface I found myself overwhelmed by all of the options at my disposal.  I know have cron, ipfilter, overclocking, vlans, and many other options.