December 13, 2019

Yet another WRT54 wifi router

I now have four (3) WRT54 routers.

Actually only 3 once you consider that one of mine died, which was the reason for purchasing this one.

This one was an ebay purchase. Total cost (including shipping) of $20. The listing was for 9.99 and said "make offer", so I offered $9 and it was mine. It is a v4 unit. It will replace my WRT54GS v5, which simply stopped working as a router. The wireless section of this unit has died a year or two previous and I was using it as a router only. I swapped by unit in the workshop in its place and immediately began seeking a new unit for the workshop, and here it is.

A stock unit should show up on 192.168.1.1, so we sill have to do the usual trick on my linux box to access it:

ip addr add 192.168.1.5/24 brd + dev eno1 label eno1:ddwrt
The unit does ping! It does respond to my browser on 192.168.1.1, but rejects the admin/admin password.

So, we need to do a factory reset, which is simple. I hold down the reset button on the back of the unit for 30 seconds.

This works and I can now login using admin/admin. Rumor has it that leaving the username blank and supplying the "admin" password will also work. I checked this, and it is absolutely true, so use either a blank username or user "admin". For all I know any username will work for initial setup.

It reports firmware version 1.05.0 and calls itself a WRT54GSV4.

I change the IP to 192.168.0.53 and do the save, then redirect my browser to the new IP number. Note that the DHCP pool follows this address change, contrary to an earlier complaint I made that it didn't.

I turn off DHCP, allowing my router to take care of this.

I set the SSID to "Hoot Owl". I will change this eventually, as this is the same as the SSID inside the house, which works, but is not ideal.

I use the wireless security tab to select:

WPA2 Personal
AES
my secret
3600 second renewal
Under "Administration", I set the router password to "w***"

It seems to take any username, I now use "root" and the password I just set and I get in. I suppose "admin" would work as well.

This now seems good to go, and I can put it in place.


Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org