dd-wrt and DIR-300

A friend purchased a DIR-300 D-link ADSL wireless modem surplus (common here) for use in her network as a wireless bridge. She’s connecting a solar power controller to her system and it has a webserver. But its located in the shed and it seems wireless was the best way to interrogate it from the house. http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Client_Bridged

Turns out its a hard modem to flash with new firmware. There are two kinds: revision A and B.

  • type dir-300 into http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/support/router-database

Labelled on bottom of the unit. B can be fixed with a firmware update from the router’s admin menu. but A’s need a more complex set of instructions. All very well documented on the dd-wrt site here:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/DIR300

but it refers to setting up a tftp server and that looked a bit tricky. Turns out thr regular distro for tftp does not support the usage needed and you need to install tftpd-hha. I found this info and a very succinct and accurate instruction on what to do by Kr0nZ here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1996348

To simplify your search here it is:

To initially flash youll need a tftp server and the firmware files on your ubuntu machine
You can install a tftp server by typing
Code:

sudo aptitude install tftpd-hpa

then you can put your firmware files in ‘/var/lib/tftpboot’ (read the openwrt link, it will become clear why)

Same instructions basically to install PuTTY which you will use to talk to the router when flashing it.

The instructions seemed complex but were very stratightforward and 20 minutes later I had dd-wrt on my router and its all good.