Hardware Weekend

Linksys WRT54GL

I bought a Linksys WRT54GL back in 2008 because I read good things about it. And it has proven all those good things about it. But I also bought it because it was very configurable. I bought a book called Linksys WRT54GL (not a creative title, admittedly) by Paul Asadoorian and Larry Pesce (Syngress, 2007; ISBN 978-1597491662) to help me work on the router. But then, I realized that I could not very well take the router apart when it has become the heart of my local network.

So, I bought another Linksys WRT54GL wireless router in order to experiment with that. So far, what I have done with the experimental router is to load, and then update, the OpenWRT firmware openwrt-wrt54g-squashfs.bin from OpenWrt site. It worked quite well.

However, I was following the A&P book when trying out the firmware. The firmware was from the White Russian development branch of 2007. At first, it seemed the only firmware available — and that can't be right, can it? Well, after a little Web research on the OpenWrt site, and the discovery of this forum query, I found that the updates for WRT54G[L] router have over the years passed from developmental branch to branch: White Russian → Kamikaze → Backfire, the latest. Also, the firmware, starting with Kamikaze, is stored under the folder brcm-2.4.

Finally, I found that, once a router is updated with OpenWrt firmware with a bin extension, it must be updated hereafter with firmware with the trx extension. With all this knowledge, I was able to finish uploading the latest firmware on the experimental router late Saturday night.

ARTiGO

I drove to Fry's Saturday afternoon to get some parts for my ARTiGO, which I am trying to revive. The ARTiGO got knocked out in a power outage, and although it can still be powered, it does not boot up or even display video. I figured replacing the hard drive will fix it, as it did the last few times it got clobbered. I found a replacement hard drive, a minor miracle since the drive uses a parallel port when most drives now use serial ports. But, I have found that it did not matter, because even with the new drive, the ARTiGO still did not work.

At this point, I felt that posting to the Arena forum on the site of VIA Technologies, the maker of the ARTiGO, would not hurt:

I bought an ARTiGO from Fry's in Indianapolis back in April 2008. I used it as a server on my local network. It worked great until last year, when it was hit by a power outage. When the power came back on the ARTiGO would not boot up: I see no POST screen at all. The power sub-board is fine, for the ARTiGO main board gets power, the power light is on and the CPU fan runs. And the ports sub-board seems to work, because an external optical drive sounds like it is communicating with the ARTiGO. And the problem is not the hard drive, because replacing that did not fix the problem. But there is no video coming out of the ARTiGO. It is as if the video circuitry is burned out. I hate to forsake the ARTiGO, because it worked so well for me. Any ideas?

Maybe I will get an answer, perhaps even some idea about what got shorted.