The Router is spare and doing nothing. So not too worried about accidently bricking it. Though I will try to use the safe path you have given and try to get it working. I already have one of my other routers on OpenWRT. But Lede is also ok, though I have not used it. But my readings tell me that they should work similarly.
I have to admit that I am not a coder of sorts, but I can manage to follow instructions and not afraid to get my hands dirty.
Would be very grateful if you could share the best one you have and is safest so that I could make some use of the router.
Would i be possible to flash it directly from the A3 stock web interface?
Yes you can flash directly from Dlink stock interface. Once this step is done you have to be careful after that.
I am just testing one last time padavan and I think it's the best and safest. It uses NVRAM instead of UCI which means the whole image is treated as a kernel (and recovers in case of a bad flash). I just tried to delete completely stock image and it was recovered automatically.
I Nand kernel partition is 40mb with another 40mb as a backup. The images hardly reach 20mb. I just used the last part of the main kernel partition as the nvram which means it does not touch the stock partitions and you should be able to go back to stock Dliink with not other partition modified.
One issue I have not been able to sort our is the leds. Padavan defines only 1 led as the power led where our router has 2 different leds (amber when it boots and blue when it's on). Openwrt handles that well but with padavan there was a choice to make - Either have both of them on when it boots or keep the amber only for boot - I chose the latter as you can just turn it off from the web interface.
Now that I explained everything I will upload it and attach the link. once you flash just have the dhcp turned on. The default IP is 192.168.2.1 and admin/admin for username password.
For the wireless bridge there is an option in administration that you can just turn on. It's called access point mode.
Here is the link. padavan-enc is the file you need to flash (fortunately nothing else will work) after that don't use that file again,
The other file is the dlink stock decrypted firmware. In case you want to go back to the stock dlink firmware. Please note that padavan won't accept it through the web interface and it needs to be flashed through telnet/ssh with "mtd_write firmwarefile.bin Kernel" . Let me know before in case you want to flash back to factory.
K
EDIT: For people who already flashed anything else outside of the stock firmware (shouldn't be many. Do not use the link to flash your router as the image is encrypted and will brick your device with the only way to recover is to use a USB-TTL).
When you said "once you flash just have the dhcp turned on". Do you mean that after flashing, the router will not have the DHCP turned on and you want me to turn on the DHCP on the router?
Assuming that 192.168.2.1 is the router IP. So if I set my PC IP to 192.168.2.2, hope that is fine.
Also, like on OpenWRT is there a specific port I need to connect the ethernet cable to for he first time? OpenWRT had to be connected to LAN Port 1.
Downloading now.
Will update you on how this goes. Thanks for the fast response... Appreciate your time and effort on this. This will save me $175
By the way you do have the A3 model right? the router won't accept it anyway if it s a different revision.
DHCP just on your computer that's all. Any of the 4 LAN ports should do. The flashing process takes a bit of time due to the size of the image to reboot to a working state.
Sometimes when the Ethernet cable stays connected the computer won't try to renew it's DHCP address. After a while and when you see all the lights on just disconnect and reconnect your cable.
Then on the browser just type 192.168.2.1 and username/pass is admin/admin.
If you turn the wireless gateway mode on the router will reboot and will disable dhcp. You will need to connect the dlink to your main router on one of the lan ports and then check on your main router the new ip address to access it.
If you cannot connect anymore for some reason just press the reset button for 10s and it should reset to factory (padavan) and you can start again.
Yes. It is the A3. This is why I could not find any firmware online. It was an Etisalat Router that I had to disconnect as I moved out of UAE. And this would not even let me use the WAN port thru Ethernet like some of the other routers that I had lying around...( I have 4 all of which are weird models with no way out...)
Thanks for the heads up. I also had one of the laptops where the LAN port would not power up till the router LAN port was active. Took me days to find this out and finally was able to solve this with my other OpenWRT router.
I only managed to get a fully working image today actually. Do you're the first person to test it. I also posted once on reddit to see if anyone wanted to try openwrt once and did not get much attention.
I am interested in knowing how the router perform. I did some quick testing with wireless using iperf3 and got about 650mbs which is not bad.
oh.. did not know that you got the working version today. More than happy to be your first tester... I just ran an online speed test and I get full speed on my internet to my PC on WiFi.
I only got 30Mbps to where I work on a 100mb internet connection. Not I get 98mbps from this router at my PC.. that is incredible.
I will be turning dhcp off to integrate this to the main DHCP so that all devices connected are on the same network and also roaming devices can transition to this router from my main router without manual network changes.
You need to create a video on youtube and save the firmware on a downloadable share that anyone can access or redirect to your website if you have one. I am very sure that there are a number of people that will use this if they know how easy it was to flash and free your router with your firmware.
You don't have to turn off DHCP manually. Just go to adminsitration and there is an option with a nice picture and it changes the router to an AP automatically.
Happy to hear that it worked for you. I found the firmware and web interface quite nice and easy to use. I think the limitations will show once you want to do some complex network setup.
Yes. Did hit it and I also re-started the router just to be sure. The settings page was showing that the DHCP was off, but my PC was able to get a 192.168.2.x IP from the router, so it was still handing out IP's. But your one click solution worked like a charm...
Really happy and super easy to use over the OpenWRT interface.
Thanks again for this super easy and stable firmware...
Ok weird then. I will try again later as I am just using it at the moment as the main router at home and it's actually working better than I expected with IPV6 as well.
I should put back my previous router this afternoon and will test the DHCP as well.
I noticed that I made a mistake in the LED definition in one of the files so I am building again a new image. Best not to flash anything again as it's just for the way the led lights behave.
Hi, @kar200. I'm interested in using your binaries to flash from stock firmware, but the first three links that you sent, the WeTransfer links and your GitHub repository, are broken.
Considering you already raid the disclaimer above. This is the 2 files you need to flash.
The one called padavan is the encrypted image that you can load from the web interface.
The other one is the stock firmware "DECRYPTED". you can use it late if you want to revert back by uploading it to the "tmp" folder and run the following command
Again I am not responsilbe if your device gets bricked.
I have concluded that for the moment it is the best thing to do due to
DSA + MT76 + DBDC just makes the boot process hang if the wirless cards are set to enabled. The only other device I could see with DBDC on openwrt is the K2P so I don't think fixing the issue will be a high priority therefore you end up with a MT7621 router with no wireless.
You cannot flash the device without an USB-TTL . What I use for these images at the moment is a binary I found in one of the early Dlink source code that worked to encrypt the image. It works with openwrt but the header needs to be modified before it is accepted by the stock web interface and I am sure the openwrt guys wouldn't accept a binary anyway.
I have very limited knowledge with coding. With github for example I noticed that the pull request could not be merged anymore and had to be rebased. It might sound silly but I wasn't able to do it after a few tries.
The user base for this device on openwrt is very small. considering you have to use a USB-TTL to flash openwrt makes it even smaller.
@kar200 I flashed it, and it went fine, however, silly me forgot to back up my existing PPPoE credentials, so I spent two hours offline trying to retrieve them so I could get connected to WAN, and everything is figured out know.
So far, the interface seems to be working just fine. Obviously, you're still heavily developing it, but in the meantime, are there any more steps I should take?
