[ Thanks to Gene
Alexander for this link. ]
“Earlier today I decided to upgrade the firmware on my
SOHO’s Linksys WRT54G v5 router. I usually do such things on the
weekends in case something breaks. It is a good thing I waited
until the weekend this time. My Linksys WRT45G is now “bricked”.
For some unknown reason the firmware update never finished although
I waited for over an hour for it to complete. Of course no internet
access was happening during this time and I could not get to any
web sites to try to discover what I could do to fix the router.“Enter an old Dell Dimension XPS R400 PC that has been gathering
dust in the closet. It has an 80GB Western Digital IDE drive, a
Startech 10/100 NIC and 192MB of RAM in it. I received this old PC
from a client that bought a new, custom built system from my
company in October 2007. He no longer needed the Dell and was just
going to trash it. Instead I convinced him to let me wipe the
drive, install Mandriva 2008 on it and try to sell it on eBay. It
did not sell when I listed it. The client did not want it back, so
I just stuck it in the IT junk closet with several other old
systems and flaky monitors. I decided to make this old Dell PC into
my “new” router. Since it already has Mandriva 2008 on it I figured
I could use that to get routing going and then upgrade the Mandriva
later.”