Before bricking my Asus WL500-W I would like to check if it is supported with the latest Barrier Breaker release?
The Asus has 32MB RAM, 8 MB Flash, and was apparently supported with the 12.09 Attitude Adjustment release.

Can any of you shed any light on this? I'm very eager to start using OpenWRT because it looks awesome to me.

Hi,

I have no idea if it helps but in my ASUS Wlan 500 Deluxw Openwrt BarrierBreaker is working, so I assume it should work for you too.
Please have a look on the supported Devices: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start#asus

Greetings

Hi, thanks for your reply. Do you own a
1. Asus WL500-W (b/g/n wireless)
2. Asus WL500-g DeLuxe (b/g wireless)
?
Those are different beasts.

It´s a Asus wlan 500g deluxe

It should be fully supported, with the FOSS wireless driver. I ran mine with Attitude Adjustment. Tried to flash Barrier Breaker on it but it went belly up. In al fairnes: it had been dieing for a while, I performed CPR on it before already. I'm no fan of flashing those older Broadcom platforms.

Make sure to flash without LuCI though (you can remove it and its dependencies using the image generator).

(Last edited by Borromini on 25 Nov 2014, 22:24)

Hi thanks for the response.

Do you know why Barrier Breaker failed?
How did you recover from that?
I might want to try BB if I know I can recover.

Why should I not flash with LuCI? And why should I remove it?

I might try AA first before going to BB.

I didn't. I once managed to resuscitate it (with a UART cable, from my own router) when I upgraded it to 12.09, but after a seemingly succesful flash to 14.07 it exhibited the same behaviour. I tried with Asus's own recovery tool (on Windows), the OpenWrt failsafe procedures, but no worky. Would have been too cumbersome to grab my own router again, open it up, and do the UART procedure all over again, so I decided to toss it. There's noone I can make happy with an old 802.11g device anyway over here.

The device was on its way out already, so OpenWrt's not to blame.

You should flash without LuCI because it's too heavy for this device (only 16 MB of RAM). It will make it dog slow. That goes for both AA and BB.

(Last edited by Borromini on 29 Nov 2014, 13:26)

I was able to succesfully flash AA on (default brcm47xx*.trx image) using Asus Firmware Restoration Utility. After reading about persistent problems with the b43 driver on the this platform, I immediately switched to using the 'wl' set of drivers. I was able to succesfully connect with 270 Mbps on 802.11n

I'm very happy with all the OpenWRT packages now available to me. I might try switching to BB later.

The WL-500 has 32MB of RAM. With this setup I still of 10MB of RAM free.

Sorry for the mixup... I thought Slicer was the OP and he said he had a WL-500G. But no, b43 and 802.11n is not a success.

Unfortunately, my router entered a state of constant reboots after a day or so.
When I tried to solve the issue with wireless, I saw that the Ethernet connections were failing.

Finally I tried to flash Barrier Breaker on the Asus. Initially I got a corrupted SquashFS, which gave weird problems.
A second flash was successful. However, the b43 and b43legacy supplied drivers failed miserably (they didn't detect the N-card).
Uninstalling those and reinstalling and configuring the wl driver more or less worked. Had to fix one other bug before I got a working base system, see https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/17262

I keep my wireless at 802.11g for now, just to try to keep a stable base system. If that works, I'll try the 802.11n mode again.

I probably also am going to free up some RAM by not using features like IPv6.

System has been running stable for about a month. Will soon start running with wl in N-mode.