Getting 404 Error after installing OpenWrt openwrt-wrt150n-2.4 on WNR3300

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I was trying to give OpenWRT a try and see how well it worked on my router. So I had DD-WRT installed and then did the flashing of the OpenWRT wrt150n-2.4. Problem is now that when I go to the router ip, I get 404 Page Not Found error. I have cleared my cache, tried different browser, multiple reboots of the router. Nothing is working.

I even tried to revert the router back to stock, but when I try to do the tftp flash, I get Connection Timeout errors, even tho ping -t is showing me TTL=100 for about 5 seconds. I have tried launching the tftp at different times, and it just won't connect.

I'm at a loss here as to what to do next. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

I tried searching for the errors mentioned about, but there are so many page hits on irrelevant pages, it was getting ridiculous trying to sift through the results.

Thanks,
Kori

2

I'm lost at what this means.

First thing I noticed is, you never tell us what address you're trying to reach.

Also, what version of OpenWrt did you flash?

3

To flash using tftp, you hold the reset button during power on. With a continuous ping set (ping -t 192.168.1.1), the first few successful pings will show a TTL=100. Then after the bootloader loads the rest of the system, TTL=64 will show up.

I get a Connection Timeout from tftp when trying to upload "any" firmware. It just seems to refuse to connect.

Downloaded OpenWRT from this page: https://openwrt.org/toh/netgear/wndr3300
http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/7.09/brcm-2.4/openwrt-wrt150n-2.4-squashfs.bin

4

explain exactly how you did this... provide references...

that version is older than windows 3.1... try here: http://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/18.06.4/targets/brcm47xx/legacy/

5

Warning

The device page says that the latest supported release is 10.03.1.

This makes since, given it's a 4/16 device.

6

To be clear, pretty much anything prior to 18.06.4 has known security flaws that have been patched in later versions and should never be used. Your device should not be used anymore and should be recycled or disposed of properly. Past that, the Broadcom wireless chip cannot support current 802.11 protocols (and likely encryption) and will degrade the performance of your network as a result.

Suitable replacements with 16 MB of flash or more and 128 MB of RAM or more are available starting around US$20.

1 Like
7

Have you tried this yourself successfully?
There is a reason why certain devices are stuck at ancient OpenWrt releases, and devicepages should not be changed to anything else if you can not confirm successfull flashing and operation of a recent OpenWrt release.

1 Like
8

I followed the instructions on the URL I posted in my 2nd post.
From inside DD-WRT, flash Open-WRT using the firmware upgrade page.

9

This router is plenty capable to handle the loads I'd be putting on it for my particular application. It's not like I'll have loads of devices on it. I just need it for 1 or 2 devices, 3 at the most. Why toss something into the trash if it works perfectly well. That's the problem with the landfills these days, ppl just toss stuff just because it's "old".

I would like to know/figure out how to get control back of this router. I may have flashed an older firmware by mistake. This was not my fault, it was Open WRT's site design fault as I used what "it" showed as being the latest version on the link above. I didn't know there was a new version available.

Any ideas on how to reach the brain of this thing to reclaim it would be greatly appreciated. It was suggested by another that maybe ssh might be an option. Any thoughts on this?

10

This is incorrect, devices with 16 MB RAM haven't been supported since 2012 (and they were effectively unreasonable to use for at least 3 years before that). You can't even boot OpenWrt on such a device without serious surgery of trimming it down brutally. It doesn't matter at all how many devices you intend to support, if it won't even boot (without crashing half way in because of RAM exhaustion) in the first place - and will crash hard once you enable the WLAN (which needs additional RAM). This discontinues support for devices with 32 MB RAM (and 4 MB flash), because it's barely possible to keep them working anymore - guess what the situation will be with 16 MB RAM.

2 Likes
11

use netgear recovery utility ( if you can find it... still got the cd? ) or pin short... should get you back, you could try to activate failsafe and erase linux or overwrite with something useful, or similar over ssh if it's running.

12

Then it looks like, if I can restore this routers firmware, I'll be using DD-WRT or the default firmware, because it was working just fine with both of those installed. In fact, I'm currently using a 2nd model with the default firmware as my main router and it works just fine.
The only reason I tried Open-WRT was because I wanted to see what was different and if it could do what I was wanting to do WiFi wise.
Had I known that Open-WRT would not run on this router, I'd not flashed it with it. The page where I downloaded the flash update from Open-WRT's page, stated that this router/firmware-version would stop being supported "after" 2019. I was under the assumption that the firmware that was listed on that page "was" the latest firmware that would work on my router.

Perhaps the great and wonderful people who handle the Open-WRT web pages should update their information to be more valid and correct. Considering a previous person posted here that the firmware listed on that site was years old.

Not only is the Open-WRT site hard to navigate, but it has outdated information.

13

Thanks, I will give this a try. Though the netgear site does say to use tftp2 to upload. However, on their site, they say to use the "default" login/pw of the router. So I wonder if that is why I keep getting connection refused because it's not being authenticated.
Thanks again.

14

was able to connect to ssh, but now gotta figure out what the login/pw is. I was thinking it was what I had set the DD-WRT to, but not so sure now. admin/admin, admin/password, root/admin, root/password, root/'', admin/'', all don't seem to work. Still working on it. At least with ssh that gets me closer to fixing this thing.

Thanks for the idea :slight_smile:

15

If you flashed a recent OpenWrt, the SSH user name is root and it will not ask for a password.

But, it's unlikely you'd be able to flash from OpenWrt because that requires downloading the image to the RAM disk and there isn't 4 MB of free RAM to do that. You will need to recover using bootloader based methods such as TFTP or serial.

16

Ok, so I decided to look up how to connect via Serial. Got that all wired up and here's the output from that log:

Decompressing..........done
Decompressing..........done


WNDR3300 Boot code V1.0.4
Build date: Sat Aug 30 09:25:06 CST 2008
Boot partition size = 131072(0x20000)
et0: Broadcom BCM47xx 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Controller 4.150.10.5
et1: Broadcom BCM47xx 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Controller 4.150.10.5
CPU type 0x29006: 264MHz
Total memory: 16384 KBytes

Device eth0:  hwaddr 00-FF-FF-FF-FF-FF, ipaddr 192.168.1.1, mask 255.255.255.0
        gateway not set, nameserver not set
Invalid image length: 0xffffffff
Loader:raw Filesys:raw Dev:flash0.os File: Options:(null)
Loading: .. 3732 bytes read
Entry at 0x80001000
Closing network.
Starting program at 0x80001000
CPU revision is: 00029006
Primary instruction cache 16kB, physically tagged, 2-way, linesize 16 bytes.
Primary data cache 16kB, 2-way, linesize 16 bytes.
Linux version 2.4.34 (nbd@ds10) (gcc version 3.4.6 (OpenWrt-2.0)) #3 Sun Sep 30 20:33:21 CEST 2007
Setting the PFC to its default value
Determined physical RAM map:
 memory: 01000000 @ 00000000 (usable)
On node 0 totalpages: 4096
zone(0): 4096 pages.
zone(1): 0 pages.
zone(2): 0 pages.
Kernel command line: root=/dev/mtdblock2 rootfstype=squashfs,jffs2 init=/etc/preinit noinitrd console=ttyS0,115200
CPU: BCM4704 rev 9 at 264 MHz
Using 132.000 MHz high precision timer.
Calibrating delay loop... 262.96 BogoMIPS
Memory: 14224k/16384k available (1462k kernel code, 2160k reserved, 100k data, 80k init, 0k highmem)
Dentry cache hash table entries: 2048 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
Inode cache hash table entries: 1024 (order: 1, 8192 bytes)
Mount cache hash table entries: 512 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
Buffer cache hash table entries: 1024 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
Page-cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
Checking for 'wait' instruction...  unavailable.
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
PCI: Initializing host
PCI: Fixing up bus 0
PCI: Fixing up bridge
PCI: Fixing up bus 1
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Initializing RT netlink socket
Starting kswapd
Registering mini_fo version $Id$
devfs: v1.12c (20020818) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
devfs: boot_options: 0x1
JFFS2 version 2.1. (C) 2001 Red Hat, Inc., designed by Axis Communications AB.
squashfs: version 3.0 (2006/03/15) Phillip Lougher
pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured
Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with MANY_PORTS SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI enabled
ttyS00 at 0xb8000300 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
ttyS01 at 0xb8000400 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
b44.c:v0.93 (Mar, 2004)
eth0: Broadcom 47xx 10/100BaseT Ethernet 00:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
eth1: Broadcom 47xx 10/100BaseT Ethernet 00:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
 Amd/Fujitsu Extended Query Table v1.1 at 0x0040
number of CFI chips: 1
cfi_cmdset_0002: Disabling fast programming due to code brokenness.
Flash device: 0x400000 at 0x1c000000
bootloader size: 131072
Physically mapped flash: Filesystem type: squashfs, size=0x121cc8
Creating 5 MTD partitions on "Physically mapped flash":
0x00000000-0x00020000 : "cfe"
0x00020000-0x003f0000 : "linux"
0x0009e400-0x001d0000 : "rootfs"
mtd: partition "rootfs" doesn't start on an erase block boundary -- force read-only
0x003f0000-0x00400000 : "nvram"
0x001d0000-0x003f0000 : "rootfs_data"
sflash: found no supported devices
Initializing Cryptographic API
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP
IP: routing cache hash table of 512 buckets, 4Kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 1024 bind 2048)
ip_conntrack version 2.1 (5953 buckets, 5953 max) - 360 bytes per conntrack
ip_tables: (C) 2000-2002 Netfilter core team
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
NET4: Ethernet Bridge 008 for NET4.0
802.1Q VLAN Support v1.8 Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>
All bugs added by David S. Miller <davem@redhat.com>
VFS: Mounted root (squashfs filesystem) readonly.
Mounted devfs on /dev
Freeing unused kernel memory: 80k freed
Algorithmics/MIPS FPU Emulator v1.5
mount: mounting none on /sys failed
mount: mounting none on /dev failed
- preinit -
diag: Router model not detected.
b44: eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex.
b44: eth0: Flow control is off for TX and off for RX.
Probing device eth0: found!
switching to jffs2
mini_fo: using base directory: /
mini_fo: using storage directory: /jffs
- init -
init started:  BusyBox v1.4.2 (2007-09-29 09:01:24 CEST) multi-call binary

Please press Enter to activate this console. jffs2.bbc: SIZE compression mode activated.
device eth0 entered promiscuous mode
b44: eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex.
b44: eth0: Flow control is off for TX and off for RX.
br-lan: port 1(eth0) entering learning state
br-lan: port 1(eth0) entering forwarding state
br-lan: topology change detected, propagating
b44: eth1: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex.
b44: eth1: Flow control is off for TX and off for RX.
BFL_ENETADM not set in boardflags. Use force=1 to ignore.
PCI: Enabling device 01:01.0 (0004 -> 0006)
wl%d: 4.80.53.0 driver failed with code 11
PCI: Enabling device 01:03.0 (0004 -> 0006)
wl%d: 4.80.53.0 driver failed with code 11
CSLIP: code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California
PPP generic driver version 2.4.2
No Broadcom devices found.

One thing that stands out to me is "Invalid image length: 0xffffffff" What's this about? Could this be part of the issue? Or is that part of the TFTPD service because shortly afterwards it says "Closing network"

There's also the line:
"Please press Enter to activate this console."
But apparently my Putty isn't sending keystrokes. I'll try another terminal program and see if that'll work.

Btw, I'm following the instructions listed here: https://infodepot.fandom.com/wiki/Netgear_WNDR3300#Recovery_via_Serial_cable

17

Sometimes a sign of bad soldering or physical connection, wrong voltage, or a “cheap clone” serial adapter (some I have only work with certain boards and vice versa)

18

Or the adapter, solder connections, voltages are just fine and the host just isn't accepting those commands.

I also tried to do a Power up w/ Reset Button pressed to help with tftpd, but that didn't work either. instead, I get the following:

Decompressing..........done
Decompressing..........done


WNDR3300 Boot code V1.0.4
Build date: Sat Aug 30 09:25:06 CST 2008
Boot partition size = 131072(0x20000)
et0: Broadcom BCM47xx 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Controller 4.150.10.5
et1: Broadcom BCM47xx 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Controller 4.150.10.5
CPU type 0x29006: 264MHz
Total memory: 16384 KBytes

Device eth0:  hwaddr 00-FF-FF-FF-FF-FF, ipaddr 192.168.1.1, mask 255.255.255.0
        gateway not set, nameserver not set
load default!
Decompressing..........done


WNDR3300 Boot code V1.0.4
Build date: Sat Aug 30 09:25:06 CST 2008
Boot partition size = 131072(0x20000)
et0: Broadcom BCM47xx 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Controller 4.150.10.5
et1: Broadcom BCM47xx 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Controller 4.150.10.5
CPU type 0x29006: 264MHz
Total memory: 16384 KBytes

Committing NVRAM...done
Waiting for reset button release...donâ–’Decompressing..........done


WNDR3300 Boot code V1.0.4
Build date: Sat Aug 30 09:25:06 CST 2008
Boot partition size = 131072(0x20000)

it waits for the button to be released, then continues on.
I wish the serial reports were a little more verbose to see what services were being loaded.

19

Some OEM firmware, I have read, doesn’t accept serial input.

Edit: A 15-year-old, Broadcom-based router that shows “NVRAM” might actually respond to the now-proverbial “30-30-30” reset.

20

Considering that the instructions that I posted via the link are "specific" to that make/model, I would expect it to work. I doubt it's an OEM issue. Something got goofed up by the old firmware that was posted on the OpenWRT page (which was way out dated and never updated to a newer one).

Jeff, please stop trying to bash the thread and recovery of this router based on its age and actually post something useful like the others have. Naysayers don't help in the progress of solving problems.
Have you even looked at any of the links I posted? I'm starting to doubt it.