What is interesting is that the official firmware from TP-Link is actually OpenWRT 12.09rc1 (reskinned by TP-Link).
Also interesting is that non of the OpenWRT stuff is included in the GPL package they have on their website for this model, nor is it mentioned anywhere on the TPLink website.
I only figured it out after extracting the firmware's file system.
If anyone has had any experience in a similar process (porting OpenWRT to an unsupported CPU), I would welcome any pointers. In the mean time I will continue investigating and report what I find.
I noted that SSH seems to be enabled by default on the device.
Its running dropbear_2011.54.
The password authentication seems to work when I use the administrator configured password from the webUI with root as a user.
Unfortunately, connecting to it fails.
The error I get is :
PTY allocation request failed on channel 0
shell request failed on channel 0
Does anyone know of a way to execute commands on the target system by exploiting luci ?
It seems the issue in getting SSH to work is a problem with /dev/pts . I'm trying to find a way to remount it.
Found the UART.
You need to bridge 2 jumpers in order to access it.
Important : I had some issues with my first USB to UART converter (a Silicon Labs CP210x). When plugged in, the board would throw a bunch of errors at boot about ECC errors and the kernel wouldnt load. (I thought I had bricked the board by accidentally damaging one of the RAM chips).
In the end, using a good old FTDI USB to UART worked fine.
Wow, nice job, I'm also a user of C5400X, however, maybe vendor has implemented some techiques to avoid user to flash with 'unofficial' firmware. Let me take a look