This last weekend I went over flashing DD-WRT, an open source
firmware for routers, into a brand-new NETGEAR R7000P router. My
particular goal was to run a VPN client in the router itself, a feature
supported by DD-WRT.
When you search about the process online
it's a bit scary, because there is a lot of stern warnings about
possibly bricking the router (that is, rendering it completely
non-operational) if you do anything wrong.
And yet I found that
the greatest risk of bricking the router comes from the sorry state of
information online itself. It often is confusing, inconsistent, broken,
or plain wrong. Once you finally find out what it is that you need to
do, the process is very simple.
So here is what I did, and some notes on incorrect or confusing information online.
What I did:
- Installed router per NETGEAR instructions, no problem.
- Downloaded the DD-WRT firmware files from http://ftp.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/downloads/betas. One thing that I found confusing is that everybody was pointing out to the beta portion of the FTP site. As far as I can tell, that is the right thing to use. Another apparently very important point (and the reason bricking often happens) is that you should really get the files for your exact model, including things like "v2" (version) in the model's description.
- Typically there is a chk file for flashing over the original router
firmware, and then a router model-specific bin file for a second
flashing.
- You apply the chk file by going to your router's administration page (usually accessible via 192.168.1.1, or routerlogin.net/routerlogin.com). Once the chk file has been flashed, you already have DD-WRT in your router. You then go to DD-WTR's administration page (again, 192.168.1.1) and apply the bin file. I basically followed the instructions in this still very accurate page: https://www.myopenrouter.com/article/how-flash-your-netgear-router-dd-wrt-5-easy-steps.
- Online explanations say that after flashing DD-WRT you will be able to connect to the wireless network without a password (meaning, to actually connect to the wireless network, as opposed to accessing the web interface for the router, which does use the default username and password root and admin), but in my case this was not true; DD-WRT kept the network password from before the flashing.
If
you do just the above you should be fine. However, for completeness and
clarification, here are some of the things I found that were wrong or
confusing:
- Some pages (for example this one)
mention that the more recent NETGEAR firmware prevents flashing the
router with DD-WRT. I have not found that not to be true at all, at
least for my R7000P.
- www.MyOpenRouter.com is an important site in this community, and includes the helpful instruction page I mentioned above, but it also has some very confusing pages providing links to specific firmware updates that are out-of-date (for example, this one, which lists an out-of-date file dd-wrt.K3_R7000P.chk). These same posts also point to the FTP mentioned above, but make no attempt to explain which one is the right resource to use.
- Several
people mention that the DD-WRT Wiki, as well as its router database,
are great resources. However, some people correctly point out that the
router database is often out of the date. The site itself refer to you
the database, and once you follow the link it warns you it is out of the
date. It also seems incomplete; for example, the entry for the R7000P
lists only the bin firmware file, not the chk one. The Wiki would not
even load most of the time, but when I managed to open it I found it
completely useless, with very cryptic instructions that seemed more like
someone's note to themselves.
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