As I am travelling quite a bit I am often in the situation that I have a hotel room with a network cable and Internet access, but I have a notebook and a smart phone with me and the only device with an Ethernet connector is the notebook.
When I saw the ASUS WL-330N3G wireless mobile router I immediately bought the gadget. It's a small and portable router with 3 main uses for me:
- Connect a 3G stick to it and the router will share the UMTS Internet via cable and a wifi network.
- Connect it to the Ethernet cable from the hotel and use the internet via the wifi network.
- Connect the router to a wireless hotel hotspot, authenticate and then use the single device hotspot account for accessing the Internet from both wired and wireless devices.
When playing around with the router you can brick the device (e.g. uploading incorrectly rebuilt firmware from the GPL sources).
If this happens, the device will not boot correctly any more but will be flashing it's power LED and possibly the network activity LED as well. The device can be put into rescue mode however where it will take a tftp uploaded firmware file and flash it:
- Connect the router to the Ethernet port of your computer.
- Connect the router to your USB port or the supplied USB power adapter.
- Press the restore button on the back of the device and hold it for 10 seconds or so.
If you are running tcpdump on the Ethernet interface you should see ARP requests from 192.168.1.1 for 192.168.1.20.
- Configure your Ethernet IPv4 address as static: 192.168.1.20 netmask 255.255.255.0.
- Use tftp to upload a firmware file to the device:
Under Windows this can be done with "tftp -i 192.168.1.1 put WL-330N3G_1.0.2.0.trx".
Under Linux you can use the "tftp 192.168.1.1" command and then send the following commans: "binary", "trace", "rexmt 1" and finally "put WL-330NG_1.0.2.0.trx" to upload the firmware image.
- Wait...
- The tftp server on the device will send OACK and reboot
At this point the device has recovered and you'll be able to log in again...