WN Series Guides and How-Tos

So you've gone and done it... you've bricked your WNR3500L.  Nothing sinks the spirits like constantly flashing lights and endless reboot loops.  However, don't lose hope or get frustrated - there's a solution to your woes, and it's called a serial console.

Before you think that this is too complicated for you, read on.  It's actually quite simple, but there are several steps involved that require completion exactly as stated.  Remember, you perform these steps at your own risk, but rest assured that I have followed these exact steps to great success and that you should be able to duplicate them.  The instructions that follow are for use on Windows systems.

Have any of you every played the "cheap router shuffle?"  Those of you who have are laughing right now, remembering the $15 special they picked up online.  Given that I come from a long line of budget shoppers, I'd been stuck with one of these very special cheap routers, which got the job done but was rife with problems and plagued with horrible firmware.  Personally, I'm not a hacker, but was eager to try NETGEAR's WGR614L, a high performance Wireless-G router that has the added ability to upgrade to various third party open source firmwares, with endless potential.

Building a JTAG cable can be helpful to those who have inadvertently "bricked" their WGR614L.  Generally, one would try the serial cable method first to try to revive the router, but if you need to bypass the software altogether and access the flash chip directly - the JTAG cable is your weapon of choice.

Here's the list of materials you will need to create your JTAG cable:

OpenVPN is used to build site-to-site VPNs with SSL/TLS protocol, or with pre-shared keys.

This article describes the procedure to configure your NETGEAR WGR614L as an OpenVPN server using DD-WRT firmware.

I am using the static key method to configure the server.  This guide also assumes that you have OpenVPN installed on your PC.

Step 1:  Generating Static Keys

At first, we generate a static key at our PC using the following method(s):

Unix:

In Unix based systems, we need to issue the following command to generate a static key:

openvpn –genkey –secret static.key

Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS) is a networking protocol that provides centralized access, authorization, and accounting management for people or computers to connect and use a network service.

A RADIUS setup basically consists of an authenticator / RADIUS client, an authentication server and a user client.

One needs to perform the following steps on the NETGEAR WGR614L with DD-WRT firmware installed to configure it as a RADIUS client: