A couple of months back, I brought a Linksys WRT54G v5 wireless router. The v5 was the latest back then, and the v5 also means, you weren't able to flash the firmware (back then *snicker*).

Everything was fine for 2 weeks, and then one fine day, the router just stopped working. Cisco being all rich and mighty, just decided to replace my router. Yay, good for me. One more week later, the second new one was gone. Dead in the middle of the night when there were no power fluctuations or anything. I was quite pissed off and wanted a different brand. In the meanwhile, I got the power adapter checked and found out the adapter was blown. Ah, so that was the culprit. Got a new adapter and the router worked fine with that. Turns out that Cisco or their support personnel don't care to even check if the router is bad or the adapter is bad...you're just given a new piece. Oh and I already know of 4 other people who had similar issues with the v5's power adapter.

Right, having ranted about that above, Versions of the WRT54G until v5, were all running Linux on them. This meant that you could flash the router and install better software on it like OpenWRT or DD-WRT. When Cisco bought out Linksys, they also ensured that there was only one opensource model, the WRT54GL and that too only available in the US (off the website(s)). The rest of their lineup would run VxWorks, which is what my v5 came with.

A while back zoneee pointed me to the Vxworkskiller link on DD-WRT and then proceeded to successfully flash the only v5 we have at work...and was needling me to give it a shot...so yeah, my v5 has now been running DD-WRT v23-micro for the last 13 hours or so without any issues. Yay.

A quick follow-up to the last post...

So you're stuck somewhere and badly need to help your dad with something on the computer at home. I've been in this situation quite a bit and well, I've usually ended up trying to troubleshoot over the phone with minimal success. Enter x11vnc. Here's a quick guide on getting it working on Gentoo.

remote denotes the box I'm using to reach my desktop on the machine home.

1. emerge x11vnc tightvnc. Substituting tightvnc with vnc will do as well, but I like some security, which is made slightly easier using tightvnc.


2. Run vncpasswd in your home directory. This creates a /home/shyam/.vnc/passwd and you will have to enter a password not longer than 8 characters in length, which I found a little surprising. Oh well.
   
3. On home, run x11vnc -rfbauth /home/shyam/.vnc/passwd -display :0. Adjust display as required (0 or 1..)


4. From remote run vncviewer home and enter the password you setup when prompted. Voila, you're in and seeing the desktop now.

A couple of points:

• For VNC to work correctly, home has to have the X Display active. From what I've seen, when I vnc into home with X running but I'm on the console, the vnc display is all distorted.


• By default, VNC traffic is not secure. It is advisable to tunnel it over ssh if you're using it from an insecure network/across the internet. With tightvnc it becomes very simple. All you need to do is vncviewer -via remote home and tightvnc sets up the ssh tunnel automatically.

Missed Barcamp, but had a relaxing weekend for the most part. Schumi showed Alonso who the boss is and I'm extremely happy for him :)

rsync is a lifesaver. x11vnc is nice to have around.