Airlink 101 AR670W - Chip & Flash Details

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Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 7:41    Post subject: Reply with quote
Hey guys! So far this looks pretty good, but I have a small issue I would like to ask you about!

Today I loaded build 13064 onto two of these ar670w routers.

One I have connected to my cable modem and set up as an AP, call this one Router A, and the other is a few rooms away and is set up as a Repeater Bridge, Router B. I have a few computers hooked up with LAN cables to Router B and they use the wireless bridge to get onto the Internet through Router A.

So far the bridge repeater mode works great, however the setup was not like the instructions described. First of all, the Site Survey feature seems completely nonfunctional. If I run the regular site survey it never shows any sites, and if I run the Wiviz one, it crashes the router and a hard reboot is required to get it up again!

However, this doesn't bother me too much, because the Router B actually connected as a client to Router A on its own, without using the Site Survey... Skipped that step, but it still worked! Weird but I'm not complaining.

Also wanted to add, I needed to use the Wireless Mac Address Clone feature to make it so my Router A and Router B didn't have the same MAC address. Before I did this I had too many problems with dropped connections and weird behavior.

Here is my biggest complaint, I could not figure out how to make the 4-port Ethernet switch connections work! On both routers they are nonfunctional. I can only talk to the router through wireless or the WAN port. Which interface are these? I thought maybe vlan1 since the WAN port is vlan2 by default. Anyway my work-around on Router B was to just bridge the vlan2 port in with the ra0 and ra1 and use it to plug into a little 5 port switch. Problem solved for now but I wish I knew how to make the 4 other ports work. On Router A it wasn't an issue as it is only used for wireless clients.

Anyway I would appreciate any advice on these questions, so far this is pretty cool!

P.S. - I almost forgot to mention one other thing. One reason I wanted to set up this repeater bridge is because I found that some of my computers with wireless N can not get a good, stable, fast wireless connection with the router. Some can, others can't. For example my laptop, which has an Intel 4965AGN adapter and works great on our Linksys wireless N router at work, can not get a good fast connection on the AR670W. Where I see the problem is gaming. Things look fine at first, and in fact speed tests seem to show good speed, but when there are a lot of packets flying you start getting big lag spikes of higher latency. Even pinging the router for a while you can see these spikes of high latency. However, some of my Wireless N cards don't exhibit this symptom. Most importantly, I find that a second ar670w connected as a repeater bridge has a very good connection that does not suffer from this problem. So, for me, it works best when gaming to have my gaming computers connected to Router B in the other room, and use the wireless bridge to get to the internet via Router A.
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winternacht
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 06 Jul 2008
Posts: 3

PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 9:40    Post subject: Reply with quote
edit im an idiot

by the way these forums don't load very well in IE8 in windows 7

and yes by the way, the 10/12 release fixed my LAN issues.
slaveunit
DD-WRT User


Joined: 06 Sep 2008
Posts: 163

PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 15:28    Post subject: Reply with quote
Yes, thank you very much gustav. I would have never guessed to go to .10. When I held in the reset button I noticed it was in a different mode but never really knew where to go from there. Thanks.
Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 17:58    Post subject: Reply with quote
Dang sorry I wrote my post before I realized that there was a build 13069 on page 23.

I thought the router database would have the latest build. I'll try 13069 and see if it fixes my LAN ports!

Anything I can do to help test this? Since I have 2 of them I wondered if that would be useful.
christianbiagi
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 12 Oct 2009
Posts: 9

PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 20:50    Post subject: Reply with quote
The firmware on page 23, is that only in source code? I couldn't see a link for it on page 23 other than to the sources.
christianbiagi
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 12 Oct 2009
Posts: 9

PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 21:35    Post subject: Reply with quote
Hellbore wrote:
Hey guys! So far this looks pretty good, but I have a small issue I would like to ask you about!

Today I loaded build 13064 onto two of these ar670w routers.

One I have connected to my cable modem and set up as an AP, call this one Router A, and the other is a few rooms away and is set up as a Repeater Bridge, Router B. I have a few computers hooked up with LAN cables to Router B and they use the wireless bridge to get onto the Internet through Router A.

So far the bridge repeater mode works great, however the setup was not like the instructions described. First of all, the Site Survey feature seems completely nonfunctional. If I run the regular site survey it never shows any sites, and if I run the Wiviz one, it crashes the router and a hard reboot is required to get it up again!

However, this doesn't bother me too much, because the Router B actually connected as a client to Router A on its own, without using the Site Survey... Skipped that step, but it still worked! Weird but I'm not complaining.

Also wanted to add, I needed to use the Wireless Mac Address Clone feature to make it so my Router A and Router B didn't have the same MAC address. Before I did this I had too many problems with dropped connections and weird behavior.

Here is my biggest complaint, I could not figure out how to make the 4-port Ethernet switch connections work! On both routers they are nonfunctional. I can only talk to the router through wireless or the WAN port. Which interface are these? I thought maybe vlan1 since the WAN port is vlan2 by default. Anyway my work-around on Router B was to just bridge the vlan2 port in with the ra0 and ra1 and use it to plug into a little 5 port switch. Problem solved for now but I wish I knew how to make the 4 other ports work. On Router A it wasn't an issue as it is only used for wireless clients.

Anyway I would appreciate any advice on these questions, so far this is pretty cool!

P.S. - I almost forgot to mention one other thing. One reason I wanted to set up this repeater bridge is because I found that some of my computers with wireless N can not get a good, stable, fast wireless connection with the router. Some can, others can't. For example my laptop, which has an Intel 4965AGN adapter and works great on our Linksys wireless N router at work, can not get a good fast connection on the AR670W. Where I see the problem is gaming. Things look fine at first, and in fact speed tests seem to show good speed, but when there are a lot of packets flying you start getting big lag spikes of higher latency. Even pinging the router for a while you can see these spikes of high latency. However, some of my Wireless N cards don't exhibit this symptom. Most importantly, I find that a second ar670w connected as a repeater bridge has a very good connection that does not suffer from this problem. So, for me, it works best when gaming to have my gaming computers connected to Router B in the other room, and use the wireless bridge to get to the internet via Router A.


Hellbore,

With both stock airlink firmwares my laptops with wireless N get terrible speeds in connection. I believe that my wireless G linksys router was a lot faster. I own 2 identical ar670w routers and have the same problem There is some mention in here about change the mode to 40 MHZ in the this post (p18 - slaveunit). Since i cannot get the dd wrt firmware to work i haven't tried the changing this. There is also some mention of intel power saving on wireless adapters totally hosing up the connection and turning that off solving it. I am also using 2 routers but my 2nd repeater is a linksys with ddwrt (plugged network cable into lan port and disabled dhcp). Wonder if having more than one router connected is causing problems?
This what i have been able to do so far. Install the factory webflash 13064, connect to my router wirelessly but not wired. Use gustav's help to get to recovery page and install factory webflash again with same results. then installed the ddwrt 13064 via the recovery page. (result with that was no wireless or wired connection) --> then install original airlink firmware via recovery page and back to original.

By the way, thanks to all who have helped me and for taking the time to develop this for ar670w! Even though i haven't got it working yet, i have benefitted for years on my linksys.
ObsidianX
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 2

PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 22:21    Post subject: Recovering to stock firmware Reply with quote
Hey folks,

I was having connection dropping issues with DD-WRT so I decided to flash back to the original Airlink firmware. I had a hard time finding information about it so I thought I'd share my findings:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Index:FAQ#Restore_original_firmware

1. Unplug the router and only plug in your computer into the a LAN port (no WAN)
2. While holding in the reset button plug the router back in. You'll see the lights in the front do a little sweep from right to left to show you that it's in recovery mode.
3. On your computer set your IP address to 192.168.1.11 with the default subnet of 255.255.255.0 (the rest can be blank)
4. Wait for your computer to accept the new IP and then go to 192.168.1.10 in your browser. It'll bring up the emergency flashing utility.
5. Select the 1.00 firmware image that can be downloaded off of the OpenWRT wiki page for the ar670w.
6. Wait for it to finish and then re-enable DHCP on your computer to get back to the original firmware.
7. Upgrade to 1.01 found on Airlink's website.

Enjoy!
-ObsidianX
Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 23:42    Post subject: Reply with quote
christianbiagi wrote:
The firmware on page 23, is that only in source code? I couldn't see a link for it on page 23 other than to the sources.


It is there, here is a direct link

http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/download.php?id=11504
slaveunit
DD-WRT User


Joined: 06 Sep 2008
Posts: 163

PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 23:59    Post subject: Reply with quote
christianbiagi,
use build 13069 not build 13064
Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 0:29    Post subject: Reply with quote
Well, I tested my two ar670w routers today with the new 13069 build software. One is set up as AP, the other repeater bridge.

Lan ports are working now!

Site survey still doesn't work, but repeater bridge setup still works great.
mddolloff
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 01 Oct 2009
Posts: 7

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 1:02    Post subject: Reply with quote
I'm new to this whole thing and can't find a place that tells me how to actually flash the router to dd-wrt. Can someone point me to directions on how to do this? I tried all sorts of keyword searches and couldn't find what I needed Sad
slaveunit
DD-WRT User


Joined: 06 Sep 2008
Posts: 163

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 1:14    Post subject: Reply with quote
mddolloff wrote:
I'm new to this whole thing and can't find a place that tells me how to actually flash the router to dd-wrt. Can someone point me to directions on how to do this? I tried all sorts of keyword searches and couldn't find what I needed Sad


Well...you dont do anything. You just go to the airlink router page and install dd-wrt (airlink-factory-webflash.bin). Then from there you can install any airlink-factory-webflash.bin. Just make sure and use the image from page 23. There was no prep for this router. Brainslayer says this on page 15 on this thread.

Edit: Yes I may have screwed up the file names in this earlier.


Last edited by slaveunit on Wed Oct 14, 2009 5:23; edited 1 time in total
Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 1:51    Post subject: Reply with quote
Hey guys just some testing results regarding the very bad wireless connection speeds on the ar670w.

I have 2 ar670w routers, one of which is the AP and one is a bridge repeater.

I connected my desktop PC directly to the AP using the LAN ports, and tested the throughput between this desktop and my laptop, using 2 ways of connecting my laptop to the network.

I used a program called "iperf" to measure the speed between laptop and desktop.

Test 1: Connect laptop wirelessly to AP with laptop's Intel 4965AGN adapter.
Traffic goes: laptop->RF->AP->cable->desktop
Result: 395 Kbits/sec
WOW that is horrible!

Test 2: Connect laptop with cable to LAN port of repeater-bridge, and repeater bridge connects wirelessly to AP
Traffic goes: laptop->cable->repeater/bridge->RF->AP->desktop
Result: 22.8 Mbits/sec
OK that is much better, but still very slow! Not good at all I must say, for a network that should handle 150Mbits/sec!

Not sure what to think, but it sure looks like either the radio on the Airlink doesn't work well, or DD-wrt, or else I need to find different settings to make it work better!

And the radio on my laptop gets very good speeds at work on our Linksys wireless N router!

I have my doubts whether the laptop is even connecting to the ar670w via wireless N. Can anyone suggest a good way to tell what type of wireless connection Windows has established to the AP?

EDIT: I see in Windows on the connection status, it says:
Speed: 54.0 Mbps
Not sure if that means I am connected in Wireless G mode or what...
The dd-wrt status page shows the connection to my laptop having Signal Quality of 58%, signal -47, noise -95, SNR 47. It does not appear to tell me whether this is a wireless a, b, g, or n connection.

It does say on the dd-wrt wireless status page that the rate is 300 Mb/s though. Probably because I set the channel width to 40MHz? Not getting the benefit on my laptop though even though it does 300N on other routers.
christianbiagi
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 12 Oct 2009
Posts: 9

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 3:03    Post subject: Reply with quote
can someone who has successfully flashed the router give an exact procedure of how they did. As specific as possible. Thanks
Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 3:37    Post subject: Reply with quote
christianbiagi wrote:
can someone who has successfully flashed the router give an exact procedure of how they did. As specific as possible. Thanks


I can tell you what worked for me on my 2 routers.

I have 2 of these routers and I have flashed each one of them 3 times (for the 3 different builds).

Here is how I flashed the first time I went from stock firmware to DD-WRT, your experience may not be exactly the same but it happened this way for me:


Starting with Airlink factory firmware, connect to the wireless network
Go to dd-wrt website and download these 2 files to some folder on your computer:
ar670w-ddwrt-webflash.bin
airlink-factory-webflash.bin

Now open up a web browser and put this into the address bar (assuming the standard Airlink settings):
http://192.168.1.1
This is the webpage where you configure the router. It will ask for your login and password. Hopefully you know what your router password is. If it's new it could be something like username "admin" password "admin" or the password could be blank, or something. I don't remember, read the Airlink manual if you can't figure this part out.

Once you are logged into the Airlink webpage you need to find the menu for firmware upgrade. One again, RTFM if you can't find this. I think it's under Administration or something. Anyway it will ask you for what file you want to use to update the firmware. Select the file you downloaded earlier named:
airlink-factory-webflash.bin

Then the update should begin. Wait about 3 minutes.

After a few minutes you may notice you are no longer connected to your wireless network, because your old settings are gone with the old firmware. There should be a new wireless network appearing now, named "dd-wrt". Connect to it, you won't need a password.

Once you are connected, put this into a web browser again:
http://192.168.1.1
This gets you to the dd-wrt configuration page. It will give you some warning saying that you need to change the password. Do so. Once you are logged into the page, go click on the Administration tab, then UNDER that, the tab that says Firmware Upgrade.

Now click the button that says "choose file" and select the file you downloaded earlier that is named:
ar670w-ddwrt-webflash.bin

Then click the Upgrade button. It will make you wait something like 5 minutes. Go ahead and wait, it's safest.

After this time, you may or may not find yourself connected to the network named "dd-wrt". If not, connect to it. Then put this into the web browser:
http://192.168.1.1

Log in with the administrator password you picked earlier and set up your stuff however you want. You now have your working DD-wrt ar670w, congrats, have fun, read the manual for how to set up all the settings! :)

That's how it worked for me. Notice I never at any point used LAN for the upgrade process. Maybe I am a gambler, who knows. At any rate, the LAN ports didn't work for me at first until the most recent build, so it's just as well.
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