For arguably too long my apartment has been dominated by the presence of a Belkin wireless router, tireless in it’s pursuit of 802.11G stability.  So I picked up a Cisco WRT610N which would allow me to use the significantly faster 802.11N technology for those devices which are capable while also supporting my “legacy” wireless devices.  This is so much fun I’m feeling palpitations just thinking about it – maybe next I should fill out some warranty cards.  Anyway, the refurb device I bought was a v1 device with OEM firmware – that just will not do – we’re going to put DD-WRT on there and let a Linux kernel do the heavy lifting.

Preface:  I take no responsibility for what you’re about to do with your router.  I don’t want to say it’s highly likely you’ll screw something up I just want to mention that it is possible that something goes wrong and your router is bricked.  If that happens you need to meet my friend Google.  Google is going to be your best friend but I won’t.  I might even laugh because of some social maladjustment.

Step 1 was to perform ye olde 30/30/30 reset.  This operation, which initially daunts the installer, involves holding the reset button for 3o seconds with the device powered up, continue to hold for 30 more seconds after unplugging, and once more for 30 seconds after plugging the device in.  Basically hold that reset button for at least 90 seconds.  After the device comes back online open IE and make your way to http://192.168.1.1 and login using admin/admin.  Navigate to Administration and select firmware upgrade.  I grabbed the binary file from here and was able to paste the following into the firmware upgrade textbox:

ftp://dd-wrt.com/others/eko/BrainSlayer-V24-preSP2/03-24-10-r14144/broadcom/dd-wrt.v24_mega_wrt610n.bin

After receiving the completion message wait for at least 5 minutes.  This short time period feels very long.  In retrospect I might have planned to get a sandwich or something – instead I spent 5 very long minutes watching the clock before removing power for 10 seconds.  Attach a PC to the router and wait to receive a DHCP address before repeating the 30/30/30 reset.  After this you can connect to the router and configure it – you’ll know you were successful when you see the DD-WRT logo as you connect.  If I’ve had one problem it was adapting syslog to use rsyslog to push privilege escalation attempts to a remote log repository.

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