OpenWRT-ing my Fonera

Wait, Stop, Hold the flaming, I know. Its slightly unethical to do so. But, the Fon2200 is utterly unusable in its usual, locked down version. I dont need the NAT (au contraire, its extremely annoying in my setup); I need more options to separate the fon and the private networks; .. Not to mention that I was tired of the lots of connection problems. So it was throwing it out for scrap – or flashing the little bitch!

So Open-WRT it is! Sadly I soon learnt that Fon has due protections against exactly that. A hardware reset and login later I discovered I was rocking fon2200 0.7.1 r5 firmware and a google search later I learnt that everything I read so far (including the fonera hacking history lesson) wouldn’t work.

Luckily, the interwebs helped out.

• Always good to know what you re fucking with: OpenWRT Fon2200 details
• DD-WRT easy Fonera Flash method: FON NEW KERNEL >= 2.6.21.1 SPECIAL FLASH METHOD
• The easy flash software for Linux: http://fon.testbox.dk/flashing/GUIflasher/linux/
• (the flashing guide is on there too http://fon.testbox.dk/flashing/flashing_guide.txt )
• The info to get it running on 64-bit linux [fonera] Flasher une fonera sous Ubuntu 64bits avec ap51-flash (yeah, thats French – The upside? Its not rocket science, merely French 😉 )
• The necessary files to flash with are on the aforementioned OpenWRT site (you could also consider DD-WRT)

All this and a slight panic later

I fear Ubuntu network manager just screwed up my openWRT update by resetting eth0 mid procedure.. ah, it just continued. #CloseOne
Gen

I was rocking my sleek new OpenWRT install 🙂 (yes I do realize that last link doesn’t go anywhere sensible for you.)

Next up – testing how good it works as a wifi extender style thingy (ie serving a Wifi network, maybe even a second and having it pass trough to a different Wifi network) to solve the connection problems in some parts of the house. (another thing the original firmware wouldn’t do) and afterwards, setting it up as an advanced wifi access point for the in-house network. Hooray!