Hello!

I made a terrible mistake when installing openwrt.  I tried flashing it over the wireless interface.  I know, I know.

So, the thing is toast.  I've just tried the documented TFTP method with a bit of success:

The router is a wrtsl54gs v1.1 and I'm using  openwrt-wrtsl54gs-squashfs.bin

I ifconfig'ed my linux box to have 192.168.1.33.  TFPT'ed the firmware from the laptop to the router via an ethernet cable directly from eth on laptop to Ethernet 1 on router (not internet)
I got this:
blah blah
sent DATA <block=2770, 512 bytes>
received ACK <block=2770>
sent DATA <block=2771, 0 bytes>
received ACK <block=2771>
Sent 1418240 bytes in 7.6 seconds [1492884 bits/sec]

So - I assume that means it was sent successfully.  I let it sit there for quite some time.  The orange "Easy Setup" button was lit after it rebooted.  Let it sit.. Gave it about 20mins. 

Now, I can't access the thing.  I can't ping 192.168.1.1 - the address i TFTPed to successfully.  I did an nmap -sP ping scan on 192.168.0.0/16 and got only .33 (laptop) as up.

Now - weirder, or maybe not - if I power cycle the router, i lose my .33 on the laptop and have to ifconfig it again.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Ok - so it turns out that this guy was previously set-up and I was able to access it via wifi.  I enabled the wifi on my laptop, joined the linksys' wireless network and was able to ssh in.

The question is this - when physically connected, why can't i ssh in?  Why do I need to be on the wifi?

you cant ssh until you set a passwd, either do it through the interface or telnet using passwd command

If you flash *.bin file you may try tftp command  "binary" before "put". It helped me in similar situation. I flashed from Ubuntu.