Use your existing printer as a wireless printer for less than Rs 2000 ($40)

With a increasing number of computers and laptops inside each house, the need to share a single printer across the house has become increasingly necessary. I personally have a office laptop, a desktop, a Android tablet and my wife has a laptop; it is a complete pain trying to attach the printer to each of them and print stuff as we need.

One simple solution is to attach the printer to the home machine and share it on the network and have your laptops print to the network printer. I do not like the solution because every time you need to print anything from any place, you need to boot up he machine where the printer is attached.


So a wireless printer is the solution. A wireless inkjet printer itself is very expensive, the moment you need a wireless laser printer, the price complete goes insane. Made me think, there must be a simple way to get to share one printer across the network in such a way that I can place it anywhere and print from any machine. I personally have the Samsung ML-1666 Laser printer.

The tried and cheap Asus Routers with a USB port come to the rescue. Some of them allow you to share printers with a default firmware they ship with, but the default firmware does not allow you to use the router as a client to my wireless network.


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So Asus WL-520GU it is for Rs 2000 as it fulfills all our needs and is really cheap !!!

Getting the router ready for OpenWRT: 

1. Boot into linux on the PC (LiveCD will work well), typically Ubuntu. Connect the PC network cable to the lan port. Switch OFF the router.

2. Run the following commands (substitute the XX:XX with your router's MAC ID which is printed on the box):

ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0

arp -s 192.168.1.1 xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

3. Now run the tftp command and enter the commands under it one by one,

tftp 192.168.1.1

binary

rexmt 1

timeout 60

trace

put openwrt-brcm47xx-squashfs.trx

Wait three minutes and then hard reboot, then go to 192.168.1.1, use default user "root" and no password to get to the web interface. Set a default password for the user.

Now do a telnet 192.168.1.1 and login using user "root" and the password you just set.

Run the following commands in the telnet session:

opkg update

opkg install kmod-usb2 kmod-usb-core kmod-usb-storage kmod-usb-storage-extras block-hotplug block-mount hotplug2 kmod-usb-ohci kmod-usb-printer

All of them should succeed !!!

Configuring the OpenWRT router 

Fire up a web browser and go to 192.168.1.1 for the web interface, move into Administration mode and fix the following:


Step 1 : Go to Luci Overview page and add luci-app-p910nd and p910nd packages to the system

Reboot the router. When it comes up and you login to the web interface again, make sure you go to Services/Initscripts in the web and enable the p910 service and reboot again.


Step 2: You should be able to see the p910nd link in the services page. Enable it.

Step 3: Now is the tricky part, make the Router works as a wireless client for your existing network by changing the settings below to suit your existing network.

 Note the fact that the network interface is set to a WAN instead of a LAN, so the router acts as a client to your wireless rather than becoming a access point itself.

Step 4: Set your WAN screen in the following way :

Step 5 : Now open up the firewall on the router to accept print requests from the WAN side:

Save and apply all the changes above and after a few minutes, physically reboot (power off and then on) the machine.

The moment of truth : Switch off the router, take off the network cable connecting the computer to the router and boot it up. Configure your main network modem/wireless router to assign a static ip address to this router (so that you can always print to the same IP). Again reboot the router and wait till the wireless lights come up. 

You should now be able to access the wireless router's web page from the computer again. Get to a telnet session for the IP that is assigned to the router :

Type "dmesg". You should see a boatload of stuff on the screen, ignore all ! Now connect the printer to the usb port on the router and switch on the printer. Wait a few seconds. Type "dmesg" again. You should see messages in the end saying the device saw and configured the USB printer.

usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2

usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

usblp0: USB Bidirectional printer dev 2 if 0 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x03F0 pid 0x1D04

Ensure that the p910d process is running using the command "ps -aef". The output should have:

/usr/sbin/p9100d -b -f /dev/lp0 0

That is it from the router side. Move the router to where the printer is at any corner of the house, connect everything and start it all up

On the windows machine:

Add a new printer, choose Local Printer. Choose to create a new Standard TCP/IP Port. Set the IP address to the IP of the route, Protocol should be RAW, Port number 9100. Install the correct drivers for the printer in Windows (This is very important).

Make sure you create a new printer and not change a existing one.

Fire a test page and the page should print out of the wireless connected printer :-)

Notes : 

1. I have tested with Samsung Laser and HP printers, they seem to work well. But that is no surety that your existing printer will always work. Do a little reading to see if anyone has had success with your printer and OpenWRT/DD-wrt before you go this route.


2. All in one printers are a different ball game. I do not recommend them and I do not use them. So read up on your own if you want support for your scanner in the All-in-one. The printer by itself should work though.

3. Samsung and HP have released nice drivers and applications for Android that allows you to print anything from the Android phone or tablet. I just installed the Samsung application for Android, setup my network printer and can now print seamlessly from the tablet over the network. This makes it a complete solution.

The quest for the near perfect HTPC continues...

My quest for a perfect (or as close to perfect as possible !) HTPC has made me change my HTPC setup multiple times over the last few years to find the right balance between power consumption, noise, size and flawless 1080p movie play. After the last upgrade this month, I think I have the almost perfect HTPC player.

CPU/Motherboard : AMD Fusion E350

The AMD E3509 is the perfect CPU and motherboard for media playback. A 1.6ghz dual core processor combined with the AMD Radeon HD 6300 on-board graphics takes care of any media that you throw at it, more importantly has on board component and optical outputs for Audio and HDMI that is capable of doing Video+Audio.

It is important to note that XBMC live works by default with a Geforce based solution because of native geforce drivers, butI prefer the Windows 7 combination with DVXA2. The second option works perfectly with both Radeon and Geforce solutions.

The best part of the solution is that the whole platform takes a measly 19watts of power. It is really unbelievable that such a powerful HTPC can work off just 19watts for the CPU and motherboard.

I got the MSI E350 board, available everywhere for less than 7k :

Msi E350IA-E45--AMD Fusion Platform | eBay

Note that when I got the motherboard from the shop, the fan was running really fast and making more noise that I liked. After a BIOS update to the latest on the MSI speed, the fan is hardly heard and is really silent now.

RAM : 2gb or 4gb DDR3

DDR3 is dead cheap now and it makes a lot of sense to get 4gb of memory to run Windows 7 comfortably.

The cheapest ram I got, 1600 for two sticks of 2gb each : EVM Strontium 2GB DDR3 Desktop RAM Memory Module | eBay


Cabinet :

Choice 1 : CFI Cube A8989

This is a beautiful cabinet that is really small and absolutely cute. It comes with a 150w PSU and is perfect as a HTPC if you intend to use a large (3.5") hard drive.

If you want some specific details of the cabinet, look at this site:
CFI Cube Casing for Intel Atom | Surfnux's Weblog

Choice 2: PANACHE T3311 : Panache

This is the one I choose. It is a really small cabinet and is very cramped, but works very well if you have a external hard drive to store your movies and only need a 2.5" small drive to boot Windows 7 and XBMC. More importantly, it comes with a DC power convertor in the small chassis that provides power via a laptop like adaptor. So no fans and zero noise from the PSU.

Hard drive : Determined by the cabinet choice above !

I went for a Kingston 30gb SSD for Rs 3300 from Primeabgb. Loads Windows and XBMC in less then 10 seconds and browsing movies is instant. This ia a perfect choice with the Panache. If you went for the CFI cabinet, you can get a 2tb internal hard drive for cheap and add a 30gb partition for Windows 7 and XBMC.

Getting it all together

Assemble the above, install Windows 7, the ATI drivers and XBMC 10.1. Start XBMC and enable DVXA2 in the system settings and you will find that every movie plays flawlessly over HDMI and CPU consumption never exceeds 15%.

Add a good media remote control for about Rs 1000 and it all works flawlessly.

It is now almost perfect HTPC solution :-)

A 110v surge protector instead of isolation transformers ?

I have been reading up a lot on step down transformers since I intend to get a Pioneer receiver from the US and am looking to see how to get a good deal.

Almost every thread on this in various forums has details on how to get the best transformer and more importantly, to get isolation type transformers. Comments like these abound : You need to get "Isolation Type" Step down Transformers. Now the reason given for getting a isolation type transformer is that the normal transformers can go bad and start supplying 240v directly instead of converting the voltage, thus bringing down the entire system.

Im thinking, how about getting a normal good brand (Maxine ?) transformer of 1kw/Rs 1k and take the output of the transformer into a US surge protector ($10) and then pass the output of the surge protector to the AV receiver. A good US surge protector comes with ample guarantees of coping with high voltages. So if the cheapo transformer does go bad and supplies more than 120v, the surge protector will kick in and protect the attached device.

Obviously, I could be missing something fundamental here in this line is thinking since folks spend 3-5k on isolation transformers. So Gurus, what am I missing here technically ? Can a surge protector NOT work with a transformer ? Any holes in the theory ?

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AMD motherboard stability issues with DDR3 (XMP based memory)

Im building a new computer with the following components:

Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H motherboard
AMD Phenom II x6 1055T processor
Gskil F3-10666CL9D-8GBXL (2x4gb)
Antec 650w PSU
HIS 5670 Video Card

I wanted a AMD 880 board and while picking the RAM, I noticed that some of the RAM were marked as specifically designed For 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ processor. It kind of put me off, but I kept wondering why it should make any difference. I assumed it is a Intel muscle at work and moved on. In short, since AMD cannot take more then 1333mhz DDR3, I stuck to the Gskill as it was advertized to run 1333mhz at 1.5v.

Assembled the comp, everything is stock, brand new, basically nothing is OC'ed. RAM settings are 9-9-9-24, 2T DRAM Freq 669.6 mhz and CPU Freq 2008.9 mhz. I put the system together, it booted first time no problem. I installed windows and then I started getting random BSOD's. The BSOD's indicated memory issues, so I ran Memtest for hours on both sticks, then each stick and there were zero errors. The memory always passed on any test I threw at it. But Windows would randomly freeze, the ATI drivers would restart randomly, basically it was hell !!!

Temps were fine for the entire time, and since I was not OC'ing anything, it did not seem like a issue. Everything in the BIOS was left untouched, voltage was stock at 1.50v and timings were stock at 9-9-9-24. I swapped the sticks between DIMM's, reseated them, etc - nothing seemed to work.

I then ran Prime35 and it would fail in a matter of seconds with a warning that there are rounding off errors. Folks on the net say that this means that the CPU or RAM is malfunctioning, which leads to data corruption and hense rounding off errors.

Frustrated, I started reading more stories on the net, then I noticed something fishy. Few other people had similar issues with AMD and DDR3 memory with support for Intel XMP (Extreme Memory Profile) and almost all of them RMA'ed the memory and got different brands. A little research pointed out that XMP allows the DDR3 and the motherboard to exchange information on what speed was necessary and how much voltage was required. On a AMD board, this information exchange was lost.

So I bumped up the voltage on the RAM manually by 0.05v and the Bios showed that the memory was now getting 1.65v. Rebooted, reinstalled and bingo, the system is now as Stable as stable can be. The Ram heats up a little, so I needed another fan blowing air on the sticks, but otherwise everything works beautifully. Prime35 ran for hours and no errors.

Moral of the story, if you buy DDR3 meant for Intel, it means that the sticks use XMP. It also means that AMD boards might not necessarily provide it the correct voltage to run at the rated speeds. In my case, GSkill claims a 1333mhz at 1.5v, but the sticks require 1.65v to be stable at that speed. So do not leave the Bios voltage at default and play around a little if you have stability issues.

Hope this helps someone facing similar issues :-)

Two short stories with a great moral...

The Frogs

A farmer came into town and asked the owner of a restaurant if he could use a million frog legs. The restaurant owner was shocked and asked the man where he could get so many frog legs! The farmer replied, "There is a pond near my house that is full of frogs - millions of them. They all croak all night long and they are about to make me crazy!" So the restaurant owner and the farmer made an agreement that the farmer would deliver frogs to the restaurant, five hundred at a time for the next several weeks.

The first week, the farmer returned to the restaurant looking rather sheepish, with two scrawny little frogs. The restaurant owner said, "Well... where are all the frogs?" The farmer said, "I was mistaken. There were only these two frogs in the pond. But they sure were making a lot of noise!"

Moral : Next time you hear somebody criticizing or making fun of you, remember, it's probably just a couple of noisy frogs. Also remember that problems always seem bigger in the dark. Have you ever lain in your bed at night worrying about things which seem almost overwhelming like a million frogs croaking? Chances are pretty good that when the morning comes, and you take a closer look, you'll wonder what all the fuss was about.


The Pretty Lady

Once upon a time a big monk and a little monk were traveling together. They came to the bank of a river and found the bridge was damaged. They had to wade across the river. There was a pretty lady who was stuck at the damaged bridge and couldn't cross the river. The big monk offered to carry her across the river on his back. The lady accepted. The little monk was shocked by the move of the big monk. "How can big brother carry a lady when we are supposed to avoid all intimacy with females?" thought the little monk. But he kept quiet. The big monk carried the lady across the river and the small monk followed unhappily. When they crossed the river, the big monk let the lady down and they parted ways with her.

All along the way for several miles, the little monk was very unhappy with the act of the big monk. He was making up all kinds of accusations about big monk in his own head. This got him madder and madder. But he still kept quiet. And the big monk had no indication to explain his situation. Finally, at a rest point many hours later, the little monk could not stand it any further; he burst out angrily at the big monk. "How can you claim yourself a devout monk, when you seize the first opportunity to touch a female, especially when she is very pretty? All your teachings to me make you a big hypocrite.

The big monk looked surprised and said, "I had put down the pretty lady at the river bank many hours ago, how come you are still carrying her along?"

Moral : This very old Chinese Zen story reflects the thinking of many people today. We encounter many unpleasant things in our life, they irritate us and they make us angry. Sometimes, they cause us a lot of hurt, sometimes they cause us to be bitter or jealous. But like the little monk, we are not willing to let them go away. We keep on carrying the baggage with us. We let them keep on coming back to hurt us, make us angry, make us bitter and cause us a lot of agony. Why? Simply because we are not willing to put it down or let go of the baggage.

We should let go of the incident soon after crossing the river, that is after the unpleasant event is over. There is no need to be further hurt by the unpleasant event after it is over.

Step by Step guide to setting up Buffalo router into a torrent downloader & NAS box

I have been using the Linksys 610N as a torrent downloader plus wireless router for the past year and while I was happy with the router, there are a few things that were bugging me. One was the NAS speeds to copy the downloaded torrents to my PC. I would hardly get 3mbps. I have also tried the Asus W500g and that was also a broadcom chipset and it was more limited than the Linksys.

So I decided that I would give a try for the Atheros wireless chipset. I shortlisted and got the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH router for INR 5k. It is a sleek black router with nice antenna's, fantastic wireless range, gigabit ports, a 400MHz processor, 32MB flash, 64MB RAM and a USB port.

The biggest stumbling block with the Atheros chipset was the fact that DD-WRT had limited support for packages on this chipset. The reason being that the Atheros CPU in the Buffalo router is MIPS while the Broadcom routers like Linksys 610N are MIPSEL. In laymans terms, it means the popular optware packages in DD-WRT compiled for broadcom will not work on this router. I installed dd-wrt and the openwrt packages using a lot of hacks documented on the web and most things did work. Then I started discovering issues, the primary one being there is no large file support in the firmware, so any downloaded files over 2gb would not even be visible on the Samba share.

This left me with the last option, install OpenWRT on the router. Information on OpenWRT is sadly less than for DD-WRT, there are lots of scattered information all over the net, but no consolidated place. Anyways, once I finished the setup, I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of NAS and the wireless ! I easily get over 7mbps to read files off the NAS connected to the WZR-HP-G300NH and the wireless range is fantastic. It also seems to draw less power than the Linksys (3watts as compared to 7watts for the Linksys).

Since I struggled for over a week to get everything working, I decided to document the procedure. Here are the exact steps to setup and configure the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH with OpenWRT to act as a wireless router, NAS and torrent downloader.


Remember a few ground rules.

1. Rule one, make sure that all the features of the router works in its default firmware before you move further. If there is a issue with the hardware, you do not want to find out after you have voided the warranty.

2. On the warranty front, OpenWRT is not a supported firmware for the Buffalo, so you might need to move back to the official firmware if there is ever a need to open a warrarty request. Do not blame me if you end up messing everything and cannot revert for some reason.

3. The router is virtually un-brickable as it has TFTP support in its bios. So you can almost always recover in any worse case scenario. Just make sure you have a Linux machine or LiveCD that can be used to update the firmware with TFTP.

4. Have a UPS connected to the router when upgrading. Power cut halfway through a upgrade is one way to void point 3. This router takes almost 5 minutes for a flash update and goes through multiple boots. Never do anything with the router till the red diagnostic LED stops flashing and the green LED come on solid. Get some popcorn if you do not have patience !!!

5. Make sure you have the Indian (B0 C0) or a non Japanese version of the router. This 4 digit code is printed on the router itself above the default SSID (unfortunately no way to figure this out unless you open the box. But if you are buying from a dealer in India, you will not get the Japanese version). If you have a Japanese version (A0 A1 or A0 A3), STOP right now and read this link , there are lots of complications with the Japanese router upgrade.


Here goes:


1. Download the latest "buffalo_to_ddwrt_webflash-MULTI.bin"

Pick on the latest date in the ftp link, move to the buffalo_wzr-hp-g300nh folder to get your file.

ftp://dd-wrt.com/others/eko/BrainSlayer-V24-preSP2/

I particularly used the file from this link for my work.

Note : There is a easier way to directly move to OpenWRT using the TFTP method as described in the last section, but I will use the easy method, even if it means three firmware flashes !!!


2. Connect to 192.168.11.1 with your browser and go to the firmware update page.

Choose the file you downloaded in step 1 and wait till the router is flashed fully.

Note : I will be referencing 192.168.11.1 as the default router page. Sometime the default page could be 192.168.1.1. One of them will always work.


3. After the reboot, if you again go to the router homepage via your browser, you should now see the DD-WRT webpage.

Change the admin password so that you can use ssh and login using the same password you just set.


4. Login to the router via ssh (Can use putty.exe)

Run these commands :

cd /tmp
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1-rc4/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-wzr-hp-g300nh-jffs2-sysupgrade.bin
mtd -r write openwrt-ar71xx-wzr-hp-g300nh-jffs2-sysupgrade.bin linux

Note : As of now, 10.03.1-rc4 is the latest, always go for the latest version you find.

Wait for a full 6-9 minutes before you do anything. When the router comes up again, you should have OpenWRT running.


5. Run the following commands one by one to install all the USB and file system drives :

opkg update

Make sure this command above completes. If there is a issue with your network, the update will fail. Fix this before you move ahead.

opkg install kmod-fs-btrfs kmod-fs-ext2 kmod-fs-ext3 kmod-fs-ext4 kmod-fs-isofs kmod-fs-reiserfs kmod-fs-vfat kmod-fs-xfs

opkg install kmod-nls-cp1250 kmod-nls-cp1251 kmod-nls-cp437 kmod-nls-cp775 kmod-nls-cp850 kmod-nls-cp852 kmod-nls-cp866 kmod-nls-iso8859-1 kmod-nls-iso8859-13 kmod-nls-iso8859-15 kmod-nls-iso8859-2 kmod-nls-koi8r kmod-nls-utf8

opkg install kmod-usb2 kmod-usb-storage kmod-usb-storage-extras block-hotplug block-mount hotplug2

6. Connect a USB drive to the router and reboot.

Im going to assume that there is a external drive connected with a single partition formatted to ext3. If you need more partitions or a different file system, you probably know what you are doing, so tweak the commands !!!


7. The next set of commands are a safety net.

If you ever bootup without the USB drive connected, you might end up writing to the router flash and mess things, so the command below will make sure you cannot write anything to the share if the drive is not mounted.

mkdir /mnt/download -p
touch /mnt/download/WARNING_USB_DRIVE_IS_NOT_MOUNTED
chmod 444 /mnt/download -R

8. Run the following commands to setup the first partition to be mounted automatically :

uci set fstab.@mount[0].target=/mnt/download
uci set fstab.@mount[0].device=/dev/sda1
uci set fstab.@mount[0].fstype=auto
uci set fstab.@mount[0].enabled=1
uci set fstab.@mount[0].options=rw,sync,noatime,nodiratime
uci commit fstab

Reboot the router


9. Run the following commands to install samba3:

cd /mnt
chmod 777 download/
cd download/
mkdir -p /mnt/download/downloads
mkdir -p /mnt/download/torrents
chmod 777 downloads torrents

opkg update
opkg install samba3 luci-app-samba

uci set samba.@samba[0].name=Buffalo
uci set samba.@samba[0].description=Buffalo
uci set samba.@samba[0].workgroup=WORKGROUP
uci set samba.@sambashare[0]=sambashare
uci set samba.@sambashare[0].guest_ok=yes
uci set samba.@sambashare[0].path=/mnt/download/downloads
uci set samba.@sambashare[0].name=download
uci commit samba

10. Samba3 is now installed. Time to configure it.

Edit the file : /etc/samba/smb.conf.template

Add the lines :

force user = root
writeable = Yes
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
inherit permissions = Yes

Remove the line:

invalid users = root

11. Run the command to start samba :

/etc/init.d/samba restart

At this point, use explorer to goto \\192.168.11.1 to make sure the samba share is accessible and writable.


12. Time to install transmission for the torrent downloads.

Run the following commands :

opkg install transmission-web
transmission-daemon -g /mnt/download/torrents
killall transmission-daemon
cd /mnt/download/torrents
cp settings.json settings.json.copy

13. Time to configure transmission startup :

Replace the contents of the file /etc/init.d/transmission with the text below :

#!/bin/sh /etc/rc.common

START=99

start(){
cp /mnt/download/torrents/settings.json.copy /mnt/download/torrents/settings.json
transmission-daemon -g /mnt/download/torrents
}

stop(){
killall transmission-daemon
}

14. Edit the file /mnt/download/torrents/settings.json.copy and replace all the content in the file with these lines below :

{
"bind-address-ipv4": "0.0.0.0",
"bind-address-ipv6": "::",
"blocklist-enabled": false,
"blocklist-url": "http://www.example.com/blocklist",
"cache-size-mb": 2,
"dht-enabled": true,
"download-dir": "/mnt/download/downloads",
"encryption": 1,
"incomplete-dir": "/mnt/download/incomplete-torrents",
"incomplete-dir-enabled": false,
"lazy-bitfield-enabled": true,
"lpd-enabled": false,
"message-level": 2,
"open-file-limit": 32,
"peer-limit-global": 240,
"peer-limit-per-torrent": 60,
"peer-port": 55555,
"peer-port-random-high": 65535,
"peer-port-random-low": 49152,
"peer-port-random-on-start": false,
"peer-socket-tos": 0,
"pex-enabled": true,
"port-forwarding-enabled": true,
"preallocation": 1,
"ratio-limit": 2,
"ratio-limit-enabled": true,
"rename-partial-files": true,
"rpc-authentication-required": false,
"rpc-bind-address": "0.0.0.0",
"rpc-enabled": true,
"rpc-password": "{414db619f34798e4204bce201b584670afd2795ax7vJCOc. ",
"rpc-port": 9091,
"rpc-username": "",
"rpc-whitelist": "*",
"rpc-whitelist-enabled": true,
"speed-limit-down": 1000,
"speed-limit-down-enabled": true,
"speed-limit-up": 100,
"speed-limit-up-enabled": true,
"start-added-torrents": true,
"trash-original-torrent-files": false,
"umask": 0,
"upload-slots-per-torrent": 14
}

If you know what you are doing, feel free to change any of the values above to change the behavior of your torrent downloader.


15. Run the command below to make transmission auto start with the router :

cd /etc/init.d; chmod +x transmission; ./transmission enable

16. Increase the life of the hard drive by making it sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity :

opkg update
opkg install hd-idle luci-app-hd-idle
uci set hd-idle.@hd-idle[0]=hd-idle
uci set hd-idle.@hd-idle[0].disk=sda
uci set hd-idle.@hd-idle[0].idle_time_unit=minutes
uci set hd-idle.@hd-idle[0].idle_time_interval=5
uci set hd-idle.@hd-idle[0].enabled=1
uci commit

opkg install of the luci component might return a few errors, just ignore them.

16. Reboot the router and browse to : http://192.168.11.1:9091

You should see the transmission webpage from where you can add and control all torrent downloads.


That is about it. Add torrents, let the router download all night, then use samba to copy the downloaded file to your machine !!!

Have fun downloading and NAS'ing

If you mess up with the steps and your router stops responding : :

1. Boot into linux on the PC (LiveCD will work well), typically Ubuntu 10.10. Connect the PC network cable to the lan port closest to the blue WAN port. Switch OFF the router.

2. Run the following commands (substitute the XX:XX with your router's MAC ID which is printed on the box):

ifconfig eth0 192.168.11.2 netmask 255.255.255.0

arp -s 192.168.11.1 xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

3. Now run the tftp command and enter the commands under it one by one,

tftp 192.168.11.1
binary
rexmt 1
timeout 60
trace
put openwrt-ar71xx-wzr-hp-g300nh-jffs2-tftp.bin

4. Now turn on the power to the router even as the command above is running.

The TFTP command would timeout a few times and will start the process as soon as the router is turned on. Wait for a full 10 minutes after the tftp command returns (yes, it takes that long !) and you should be back up and running.