Asus WL-500g Premium
The device (in short: WL500gP) is fully supported by FreeWRT. You can install the FreeWRT firmware via the update function of the vendor web administration. The vendor uses NVRAM to store information about the configuration of the device. FreeWRT ignores these settings.
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Architecture: MIPS Vendor: Broadcom Bootloader: CFE System-On-Chip: Broadcom 5365 CPU Speed: 266 MHz Flash size: 8 MiB RAM: 32 MiB (only 16 MiB enabled by default) Wireless: integrated Broadcom BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller Ethernet: Robo switch BCM5325 USB: 2x USB 2.0 Serial: yes JTAG: no NVRAM: yes |
Network configuration
The default network configuration is:
| interface name | description | default IPv4 configuration |
| eth0.0 | LAN Ports | 192.168.1.1/24 |
| eth0.1 | WAN Port | dhcp |
| eth2 | Wifi | disabled for security reasons |
TFTP Installation notes
Pull the power plug, press and hold the reset button, plug the device back in and wait until the PWR LED starts flashing slowly (almost immediately). Now release the reset button and upload the firmware by TFTP using the flash script (preferred) or the following commands:
TFTP commands:
tftp 192.168.1.1 tftp> rexmt 1 tftp> binary tftp> trace tftp> put freewrt-asus-wl500g-premium-brcm-2.4-jffs2.bin tftp> quit
After this wait 5-7 minutes, depending on the size of the firmware image. After that you need to manually restart the router by removing and re-inserting the power plug again.
Note: the WL-500gP flashes very slowly, you might want to add an extra minute or two just to be on the safe side if your image is larger than 2-3 MiB or using the -F or -d option to flash.sh.
As an alternative (or if this installation routine doesn't do the trick for you) you can always use the ASUS Recovery tool from your utilities CD to upload your firmware.
Serial console
The serial pins are documented on the board. The simplest way is to use a RS232 or USB phone cable and connect RX, TX and ground.
Bootloader commands
Use Ctrl-c to get into the bootloader prompt. Use “help” to get all available commands.
If you want to reset the nvram variables, use:
CFE>nvram erase CFE>reboot
Recovery mode not working
If you ever have the problem that your device does not respond on the IPv4 address 192.168.1.1 in recovery mode, there is a really good chance that your NVRAM got corrupted. In this case, the bootloader is reachable via the IPv4 address 192.168.2.1. Reconfigure your network and the device should be pingable and reflashable again. You can then reset your nvram partition, it will be automatically populated with default values on next boot cycle.
NVRAM erase with FreeWRT:
mtd -r erase nvram
dmesg
CPU revision is: 00029006 Primary instruction cache 16kB, physically tagged, 2-way, linesize 16 bytes. Primary data cache 16kB, 2-way, linesize 16 bytes. Linux version 2.4.34 (tg@flyingfish) (gcc version 3.4.4 (FreeWRT rev. 2729)) #2 Fri Jun 8 16:02:57 UTC 2007 Setting the PFC to its default value Determined physical RAM map: memory: 02000000 @ 00000000 (usable) On node 0 totalpages: 8192 zone(0): 8192 pages. zone(1): 0 pages. zone(2): 0 pages. Kernel command line: init=/etc/preinit noinitrd console=ttyS0,115200 rootfstype=squashfs root=/dev/mtdblock2 CPU: BCM4704 rev 9 at 264 MHz Using 132.000 MHz high precision timer. Calibrating delay loop... 262.96 BogoMIPS Memory: 30496k/32768k available (1464k kernel code, 2272k reserved, 100k data, 88k init, 0k highmem) Dentry cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 3, 32768 bytes) Inode cache hash table entries: 2048 (order: 2, 16384 bytes) Mount cache hash table entries: 512 (order: 0, 4096 bytes) Buffer cache hash table entries: 1024 (order: 0, 4096 bytes) Page-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 3, 32768 bytes) Checking for 'wait' instruction... unavailable. POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX PCI: Initializing host PCI: Fixing up bus 0 PCI: Fixing up bridge PCI: Setting latency timer of device 01:00.0 to 64 PCI: Fixing up bus 1 Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4 Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039 Initializing RT netlink socket Starting kswapd Registering mini_fo devfs: v1.12c (20020818) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au) devfs: boot_options: 0x1 JFFS2 version 2.1. (C) 2001 Red Hat, Inc., designed by Axis Communications AB. squashfs: version 3.0 (2006/03/15) Phillip Lougher pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with MANY_PORTS SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI enabled ttyS00 at 0xb8000300 (irq = 3) is a 16550A ttyS01 at 0xb8000400 (irq = 3) is a 16550A b44.c:v0.93 (Mar, 2004) PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:01.0 to 64 kmod: trying to execute user mode helper '/sbin/hotplug' with args 0='/sbin/hotplug' 1='net' and env 'HOME=/' 'PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin' 'INTERFACE=eth0' 'ACTION=register' eth0: Broadcom 47xx 10/100BaseT Ethernet 00:0e:a6:f1:e3:6e PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:02.0 to 64 kmod: trying to execute user mode helper '/sbin/hotplug' with args 0='/sbin/hotplug' 1='net' and env 'HOME=/' 'PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin' 'INTERFACE=eth1' 'ACTION=register' eth1: Broadcom 47xx 10/100BaseT Ethernet 40:10:18:00:00:2d Physically mapped flash: Found an alias at 0x800000 for the chip at 0x0 Physically mapped flash: Found an alias at 0x1000000 for the chip at 0x0 Physically mapped flash: Found an alias at 0x1800000 for the chip at 0x0 Amd/Fujitsu Extended Query Table v1.3 at 0x0040 number of CFI chips: 1 cfi_cmdset_0002: Disabling fast programming due to code brokenness. Flash device: 0x800000 at 0x1c000000 bootloader size: 262144 Physically mapped flash: Filesystem type: squashfs, size=0x4e1720 Creating 7 MTD partitions on "Physically mapped flash": 0x00000000-0x00040000 : "cfe" 0x00040000-0x007d0000 : "linux" 0x000b7800-0x005a0000 : "rootfs" mtd: partition "rootfs" doesn't start on an erase block boundary -- force read-only 0x007f0000-0x00800000 : "nvram" 0x007d0000-0x007f0000 : "fwcf" 0x00040000-0x007f0000 : "fwrt_all" 0x005a0000-0x007d0000 : "rootfs_data" IEEE 802.2 LLC for Linux 2.1 (c) 1996 Tim Alpaerts NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0 IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP IP: routing cache hash table of 512 buckets, 4Kbytes TCP: Hash tables configured (established 2048 bind 4096) NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0. 802.1Q VLAN Support v1.8 Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com> All bugs added by David S. Miller <davem@redhat.com> VFS: Mounted root (squashfs filesystem) readonly. Mounted devfs on /dev Freeing unused kernel memory: 88k freed Algorithmics/MIPS FPU Emulator v1.5 diag: Detected 'ASUS WL-500g Premium' Probing device eth0: found! b44: eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex. b44: eth0: Flow control is off for TX and off for RX.
