Hello, everyone, first of all let me introduce myself with this first post and, please, accept my thanks for your wonderful work and the plethora of information to be found here.
I have a horribly annoying problem with my (almost) new WL700gE (which I am starting to believe to be cursed, somehow). The scenario is as follows:
- mid March: happy owner of a brand new ASUS WL700gE router + storage server, with a 250GB internal HDD (which was a very pleasant surprise, since the specs were advertising an 160GB HDD).
- start of April: installed OpenWRT by flashing the router with the image found on http://wl700g.homelinux.net/drupal/?q=node/19 . Wonderful website, lots of info. Result: flawless instalation, brand new, out-of-the box OpenWrt. Due to some problems with my company, I had to postpone the fine-tuning of the installation, as well as the installation of new services, espacially of a VPN solution (based on OpenVPN, PPTP or OpenSwan).
- mid May: At last I decided to start the big step of installing the VPN, since I badly need a solution to adding an extra layer of encryption to my wireless network. The disaster: while getting the router from the shelf, I accidentaly dropped it, from about 1m (3ft), on the parquet floor. After pluging it in, the "READY" led kept flashing, without any further activity. At that time, I did not think to test if it responded to pings and, as a result, if maybe a new flash might have done some good. The truth is that I was convinced that it was a hardware thing (i.e. a "smashed electronic thingie" problem). As a result I took it to the ASUS Authorized Service Provider (in Prague, Czech Republic, where I live), hoping that they'll repair it, if I would hide the fact that I dropped it (I'm sure that this would void the warranty).
- first week of June: surprise ! They repaired it, even though it took 3 weeks. I took it back, fully functional. Found the original ASUS firmware 1.0.4.6 installed. No surprise here, I was expecting that.
Here comes the annoying thing: after this service "operation", I cannot install Openwrt anymore. I tried repeating the steps on the tutorial quoted above, no luck. After flashing, I can telnet to it, dmesg will show an error which I do not remember right now, but which depicts a lack of space in the flash memory (apparently, the firstboot procedure depletes the storage space). Fdisk shows no discs installed. After reboot, the router will no longer come alive (READY led lit steady, no reply to pings on none of the interfaces, no DHCP client on the WAN inteface, otherwise said, dead). I tried the "micro" version. After reflashing and restarting the router, no leds will light up, the router appears as having no power. I tried compiling my own image in a Ubuntu VMWare installation, no luck. The same behavior, no lights, apparently no power. All I can install is the original firmware and the modified firmware posted by Back2Basics (I also found it posted by kfurge, hello guys, thanks a lot !). This works alright, exactly as it worked before, but, unfortunately, I cannot install any VPN solution on it, due to obvious lack of functionalities.
My suspicion is that the router has been somehow neutered while being serviced. Obviously, I cannot take it back it complain that I cannot install other software than the supported ASUS firmware. The worst part is that I am not even sure about its "neutering", this hypothesis seeming a little far fetched.
The conclusion of this ultralong post (my apologies for the its length) is: does anybody know anything about this ? has anyone bumped into this problem before ? Could anyone guide me into restoring a healthy OpenWRT environment on this router ?
I end the post by mentioning: before the accident, the first OpenWRT flash was made using a Windows XP installation and the built-in tftp program of XP. After returning from service, the subsequent flashes have been made with Windows Vista and the built-in tftp program of Vista.
Thank you for your patience in reading this and I am really looking forward to a constructive reply.