Just picked up this router in a pretty spectacular sale on Newegg. link

I'd love to contribute to a functioning OpenWRT build.

(Last edited by sterlingh on 30 Oct 2014, 21:41)

would someone summaries what is still missing for this router to be supported?

(Last edited by nroberto13 on 30 Oct 2014, 21:17)

I to would like to know of there is any progress here.
I would love Openwrt on my router.

I got mine for the price of the included 2 TB HDD alone.

Count me in for contributing money to an OpenWRT build.

(Last edited by SL2 on 13 Nov 2014, 04:31)

i have that router gathering dust i can throw in some contribution if a dev stand up to support it
thanks

Is this helpful?

http://nils.schimmelmann.us/post/986167 … 900-router

I am not a developer so can't say much but I am open to contribute if someone is working on this.

This is extremely helpful - thanks for sharing.

Somewhat related, if only a pointer: In the last few days, I have been working on "liberating" a system also using the APM82181 SoC, albeit a very different one: The Western Digital My Book Live uses the exact same SoC. It is running Debian out of the box, highly (pre-/mis-)configured by WD, but obviously very hackable. Also, its NAND (only 512k) contains a U-Boot that is searching configuration and booting Linux from the attached hard disk. There exist kernel patches for 2.6.32 (up to .61), main development is apparantly by a Russian named Alex Rhyzov, so most of the documentation is in Russian language (which Google Translate struggles with quite a bit).

Maybe both machines, the NAS and the router, can profit from Alex' development and it can be ported over into OpenWrt development? It would certainly help the platform in general, as it seems the APM82181 target has been somewhat abandoned after kernel 2.6.32 (newer kernels would work, too, but apparantly lack DMA and have buggy SATA implementation).

(Also, My Book Live enclosures come dirt cheap at the moment. I recently got two empty enclosures for €10 each to do experiments on. They take pretty much any hard disk, as long as you manage to perform the "debricking" method on them -- effectively ironing a factory firmware on an empty disk. My personal goal is to construct a "free", standardized firmware on this "makeshift" NAS and take it over on my MBL machines that have been running on WD's firmware for years.)

Edit: It's quite hard to follow the development on the Russian forums, but there seems to be active developments. Another russian developer who goes by the name of "Night_Ghost" apparantly has been successfully patching Kernel 3.2.64. I have yet to try this one out, though, mainly because cross-compiling is a bit of a hassle at the moment due to Debian not offering a cross-build environment at the moment.

(Last edited by metai on 19 Dec 2014, 20:11)

Any news on this? I managed to build the netgear image on a VM, but right now am struggling a bit trying to understand the build environment, in particular how to add dropbear as it seems to be missing and "feeds/scripts search dropbear" returns empty.
I'd like first to get a ssh and a owncloud server running there, and then start working to resizing existing hd partitions and adding a swap and a ext4fs to run the system from. I might even resize/create the partitions externally, but mine has some hardware issues, installing the disk means dismantling the whole box, so I want to see if I can do all "natively".
Any ideas/ pointers?

Unfortunately Netgart ended support for the WNDR4700 - EOL (END OF LIVE).

I'm on that site as well. I have Gentoo running on my MyBook live along with the latest 2.6.32.x kernel. I'd be willing to try out 3.2.64 (or 66) and see if that works.

Kernel support has always been a pain with this SoC. It looks like they abandoned it early and kept the code to themselves.

Is there any update on this? Since now Netgear has ended support, custom firmwares are only hope.

Seems no one's working on this:(

Me too.  $20.

Just as a quick update: I had a Debian Wheezy with kernel 3.2.64 working on it, it worked just fine, I just didn't get around to actually do anything with it. But the patches are sound.

Hi.
Right now buys used WNDR4700 from Amazon. As for me, it will send this router to Kaloz from forum openwrt.org.

PS: @metai did you testing this debian on WNDR4700 ?

The hardest part with supporting this router is that the SoC doesn't have mainline linux support. Everything else is trivial in comparison.

I'm not an OpenWRT dev or a linux kernel dev, but I'm going to take a look to see if the Russian guy's patches can be brought over to newer kernels without much effort. If that works, and only then, can I can look into adding device support into OpenWRT for it.

I am willing to contribute some money too, if we can get some support.

No, I compiled and ran it on a Western Digital My Book Live. Same SoC, different board and different additional hardware.

That would actually greatly benefit both systems (and a few others more in the process, I reckon). I have been talking to some knowledgeable guys at 31C3 who would certainly be on board with a public repository to get these systems up to speed.

(Last edited by metai on 31 Mar 2015, 21:57)

$20. again

(Last edited by 10zhenhua on 10 Apr 2015, 10:23)

Hi there.I bought a Netgreat WNDR4700 .Since looks like no one in a English forum is making firmware to this router, I would love to take the job.
I want all you to know someone is working on this.Don`t worry.I would release a alpha firmware in one week.

I am.

Hi Paul, do you have somme news?

All I can say is that I ensure you this router could have openwrt.

@PaulWang this router have OpenWRT but is closed, Netgear used old versions of Kamikaze r24196 of the kernel 2.6.32.11
Best would do well to adapt the new edition of BB or CC on this router.