This is for peeps searching on the WA840G, trying to solve Wireless
Bridging or Client Bridge issues
Configuring Motorola WA840G with OpenWrt to use as a client bridge
After being incredibly frustrated with Motorola's manufacturers
firmware, both from usability (terrible and complicated web interface)
and reliability (it's not capable of doing what is says on the tin), I
stumbled across a couple of replacement firmware's, not specifically
for the WA840G, but for quite a few wireless networking devices.
http://www.dd-wrt.org/
http://openwrt.org/
After doing a bit of reading it appeared no one had dd-wrt running on
the WA840G, however there were very brief install instructions for the
openwrt project
http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/...otorola/WA840G
What version do I have?
There were also comments about there being two versions of the WA840G,
the first having a larger flash ROM of 4MB, and version two, only
having 2MB. The possible issue being that the new open source
firmware's won't fit in 2MB of ROM and could brick your device
I have not yet accurately determined how to tell this. My device is
mid grey, and does not have Version 1 or 2 marked anywhere. I know
there is a black version of the WA840G, perhaps this is version 2 of
the device?
Regardless, I was so feed up with the WA840G that if attempting to
flash, killed it, so be it. I would buy a Linksys and be done with it.
Installing
As I upgraded from Motorola's latest firmware 6.1.4) avail from
http://broadband.motorola.com/consum...HomeNetworking,
and you are following these instructions, I suggest you start with the
same.
I used the smaller of the two available images from the latest avail
release RC5, 27 March 2006.
http://downloads.openwrt.org/whiteru...g-squashfs.bin
I was hoping that even if I had a version 2 device, because the
firmware is less than 2MB, that the device would survive. I then used
the currently installed Motorola web interface to flash the image fine.
Wait a minute or two (DO NOT TURN OF THE POWER!) for the device to
flash. You will see the LAN light start flashing red / green. In my
case the device came back up with the same IP that I had set in the
Motorola firmware. There are also suggestions that it could come back
as the default 192.168.40.1/24 or even 192.168.10.1/24
Configuring
In my case I wanted to use the device as a client bridge. The new web
interface is very clean, if a little slow. Once configured however, it
flies! The first time you will be asked to set a password. Do this,
as we need SSH access below.
Because I wanted to use WPA, an additional module needs to be
installed. SSH into the IP for the web interface, login as root and
the password above.
Make sure the box has Internet access (I just plugged it into my
router, with the gateway / dns set to it).
>ipkg update
>ipkg install nas
Now in the web interface you can set to use WPA encryption etc
That's it! Note that the Wireless light no longer works .. the only
prob I have found so far
Afternote: Once I had the replacement firmware installed, I could tell
that I have a version 1 device,
root@OpenWrt:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
system type : Broadcom BCM947XX
processor : 0
cpu model : BCM4710 V0.0
BogoMIPS : 82.94
>From the hardware page, this is a version 1 device
http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware
Hope this helps someone
S
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