D-Link DIR-846

Hi all!

I have recently buy a 6 antenna D-Link router (DIR-846) mainly to use it as a Wi-fi Dual Band repeater. Saddly I was surprised when I noticed that the product don't have this BASIC function (repeater mode).
Any chances OpenWrt team also include firmware support for this D-Link model?

ftp://ftp.dlinkla.com/pub/DIR-846/DIR-846%20Datasheet.pdf

BR,
Bruno

This DIR-846 router was acquired on the Brazilian market so I couldn't find the FCC certification but only the Brazilian National Telecommunication Agency homologation number (ANATEL 02417-19-01931).
Anyway this D-Link DIR-846 is a 11AC 1200M Dual band WiFi Router.
The hardware version printed on the product is A1.
The stock firmware version is FW100A50DBR-Retail.

I have opened the product in order to see carefully for the chipsets used on the board. I could easilly find 3 of them, all manufactured by Realtek:

BR,
Bruno

There currently is no support for any Realtek SOC or WLAN chipset.

Thanks for your quick answer!
I was really hopefull that I would solve this issue by flashing a custom firmware. Too bad Realtek isn't supported. Do you know the reason for that?

Originally, because Realtek SOCs were not using a full mips ISA, but had only licensed a subset of the ISA (search for "lexra" in this forum, this would have required patched toolchains (binutils, gcc, libc and more), I'm not sure if this still applies to the RTL8197F though. The very last generation of Realtek SOCs abandoned that nonsense, probably because some of the relevant mips patents expired.

Sadly there are more issues than 'just' the lexra part, while Realtek provides the (ancient) source for their SOCs, they haven't really pushed any of these changes back into the mainline kernel so far. As a result this means it would require a lot of effort to forward port them to contemporary kernels and to keep the patchset viable and functional. The WLAN side of isn't really much better, (mainline-)support for their WLAN chipsets is spotty at best - and often requires severely patched (ancient) hostapd forks to function.

On top of this, most of the Realtek based routers we've seen so far were very low-end (often below or at the minimum system requirements for OpenWrt) in terms of CPU performance, flash and RAM sizes - making this not a very attractive target to work on (considering the immense amount of efforts to beat it into shape - in contrast to the potential results of all that work).

That's more than sufficient for me to understand. I believe at least I can use this router as a paper weight.
LOL

Thanks!

Hi, Sorry for restarted this old topic.

I have buy these router because of the price and for these gigabit ports.

After some search for how install the openwrt inside it with no luck, i try how gain root access to it, downloaded the firmware and run the binwalk on it and extract the files, just to discover, these router ALREADY RUN OPENWRT (14.07) INSIDE IT.

To avoid brick the thing, first i try using john to discover the ssh password on it, after 4 hours, in my octa-core 16gb ram notebook i have change my approach to on how inject a script to change the password for me.
Long Story Short, with the extracted files, Qemu and luck i have created one Hacked Backup Config from my router with changes inside firewall config to call one script to do it and get root access and this work.

First i will make a clean hacked config for anyone who wants it.
The user / password will be:
root / root
admin / admin

Don't forget to change later the password, edit the firewall, disable the script and remove the file "/etc/config/hack.fw" references.

Second these root access can be used to get the info need to compile one updated version of Openwrt? If do what kind off info are need?

Let me know.

1 Like

THEY ALL DO ...

Hi again. Like Promisse there are the config files.
One to change the password and other clean to remove the hack files.

Clean Config

Change Password Config

2 Likes

Hi Tecnolobo,
Can you share about the injectiong script details? That will help me a lot.
I'm using this router currently and got an ipv6 DNS issue, so I want to disable ipv6 but not able to in web UI.