I remembered that I got this WGT634U a year ago in order to make a music player (a la http://devices.natetrue.com/musicap/), and I never got much farther than installing a copy of OpenWRT on it (ok, so I was able to set up the toolkit, build a version of it from cvs and flash it to the device, but whatever). Anyway, I have been hating on (its a technical term) my current router (a D-Link DI-624), and thought it might be fun to use the Netgear kit along with OpenWRT.
A quick check on their site shows that Kamikaze is officially supported now, and there is an official build for the WGT634U, so no need to compile my own image. I grabbed the latest image (openwrt-wgt634u-2.6-squashfs.bin) and followed the instructions on this page to flash from the serial console (you will have to have a serial dongle, I made mine with a MAX3232 a long time ago). There are a few things that had to be done to be able to install this:
* Set up a TFTPD daemon on my local pc, instructions for Ubuntu are located here
* Open minicom on /dev/ttyS0 (the serial port I am using on my desktop) and hold down Ctrl+C while
* Repeatedly switch the router on and off (using a power strip), because the thing does not always come up correctly (a little worrisome? my guess is the power supply isn’t adequate)
Once I did all of this, I was able to flash using TFTP and reboot the router with no problem. Still using the serial console, the next step was to set a root password using passwd.
At this point, the router appeared to be functioning as a router (albeit without wireless capability), and after plugging my pc into it, i was able to pull an IP address from it and use it. However, by default the Kamikaze images do not include a GUI interface for the router, so I installed this next by following the instructions here:
* add http://downloads.x-wrt.org/xwrt/kamikaze/7.07/brcm-2.4/packages/Packages to the package file /etc/ipkg.conf
* update packages: ipkg update
* install webif: ipkg install webif
Webif is *really* nifty, and includes all sorts of monitoring goodies. (screenshot)
Next, it was a good idea to set up an NTP client, to make sure that the time on the device is correct (for logging, etc). This was done using webif, I am not sure what it had to do, and nothing appeared to happen until I reset the router. Also, I changed my time zone but that setting did not seem to stick. Not a big deal for this device.
So, at this point, I have a working router running OpenWRT that I can ssh into or connect to using a web interface to configure. Sweet!
But some things are missing, namely usb support (flash drives, bluetooth dongle, etc) and wireless!
For USB, I tried following the instructions from a discussion here:
* install the correct kernel modules: ipkg install kmod-usb-core kmod-usb2 kmod-usb-storage kmod-fs-vfat
* install a codepage so that vfat doesnt complain: ipkg install kmod-nls-iso8859-1 kmod-nls-utf8
This did *not* get usb working, but my time is up for the day. To be continued…