Airlink 101 AR670W - Chip & Flash Details

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Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 4:42    Post subject: Reply with quote
I just noticed something!

Site Survey works on my AP! I can see other networks! Wow!

Unfortunately Site Survey does not appear to work at all on my repeater-bridge!

Strange isn't it? On the repeater-bridge when I click Site Survey it instantly opens a window showing that nothing was found. If I tell it to Refresh it instantly refreshes. It never finds anything.

On the AP, however, it takes a while to load, and shows all the networks in my area.
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slaveunit
DD-WRT User


Joined: 06 Sep 2008
Posts: 163

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 5:25    Post subject: Reply with quote
Hellbore wrote:
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.


I would NOT recommend flashing over wireless LAN. I would only even consider that if I couldnt use the LAN ports. That seems a bit basic to me?

BrainSlayers airlink-factory-webflash.bin on page 15 works fine for the initial flash. Then after that I would recommend the 13069 dd-wrt file.
Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 5:48    Post subject: Reply with quote
Well I have been able to get better results connecting Wireless N from my laptop by doing 2 things:

-Changed wireless security mode to WPA2-PSK
Apparently my laptop will NOT connect .11N if WPA-PSK or WEP are used. It just connects .11G, to get a .11N connection I MUST use WPA2.

-Changed the channel from 11 down to 9
Apparently from what I have read, Windows 7 has issues running on channel 11. How can this be? It sounds crazy, but then... when I switched to channel 9 it improved my bandwidth from around 200Kb/s up to somewhere more than 20Mb/s. Not sure exactly what the speed is now but it's a big improvement.
mddolloff
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 01 Oct 2009
Posts: 7

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 10:35    Post subject: Reply with quote
slaveunit wrote:
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.


Great thanks! I must have missed the original part about having to flash it with the "factory" first. I couldn't get the "670" to load and that was why. Thanks!
christianbiagi
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 12 Oct 2009
Posts: 9

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 15:54    Post subject: Reply with quote
Hellbore,

Thanks for taking the time to put down what worked for you. I should note that i didn't ever upgrade firmware wirelessly. I wasn't doing anything wrong that i know. I think that all or most of my problems were caused by using the 13064 version first. after about 15 flashes i finally found the september 24th version in the forum and that cleared it up. Again, the symptoms i had were failed network ports or at the least web page admin wouldn't connect and i couldn't ping the router. Ememergency recovery mode worked very well (over and over) at 192.168.1.10. Though at one point one of my flashes back to original firmware either didn't take or the network ports were messed up. Another time it worked fine.
So in my case, try, try again and luckily the router was recoverable. Now i will put it into service and see if wireless N performance is better than it was with airlink firmware.

I wonder how important this 30/30/30 reset is in the equation. I did that several times but it appeared not to be a factor.
Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 20:18    Post subject: Reply with quote
christianbiagi wrote:
...Now i will put it into service and see if wireless N performance is better than it was with airlink firmware...


I'm anxious to hear your results, though I have a feeling you won't get great performance from it. These things don't appear to do Wireless N very well, unless I'm missing something. Seems like it does well in signal strength but falls on its face in the bandwidth department.

For example, my desktop PC has an Airlink101 AWLH6070 150N wireless PCI adapter that they started selling the same time as the router, and had the same style packaging, basically they would seem made for each other. Even this adapter does not get good bandwidth from the router. See this test result I did with iperf:

Laptop and desktop connected via gigabit switch: 286 Mbits/sec

Laptop connected to switch, desktop connected via 802.11N, with router right next to desktop: 44.5 Mbits/sec

And yes I verified that the desktop was connected via 802.11n. Windows status for the connection also shows 300Mbps which obviously is very optimistic lol...

So why are speeds higher than 44.5 Mbits/sec not happening with 802.11n even in the best case I can set up? It's very strange. I don't think the limitation is coming from iperf because as you can see, it does almost 300Mbits/sec if you're just doing it over the gigabit LAN.

To be fair though, I have not performed this same test using Airlink's own firmware. Could be something about dd-wrt causing the slowness. I might back up my settings and flash the factory firmware back on there just to find out, then I can go back to dd-wrt if the situation didn't improve.
Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 21:42    Post subject: Reply with quote
OK I compared the stock firmware speeds to the dd-wrt firmware speeds.

Both tests were set up like this:
Laptop connected to switch, desktop connected via 802.11N claiming 300Mbits/sec, with router right next to desktop.

Test 1, Airlink firmware 1.01: 14.3 Mbits/sec
Test 2, dd-wrt build 13069: 45.2 Mbits/sec

So, the slowness does not appear to be caused by the dd-wrt firmware, in fact dd-wrt is faster in my test.

I made sure all wireless settings were the same (as much as possible in stock firmware). Used channel 9, lower extension channel, 40 MHz width, WPA2-PSK, etc. In both cases Windows reported that the adapter was connected at 300Mbits/sec.

Also, I may have made some wrong assumptions, I have been reading around and it seems that actual throughput of 45 Mbits/sec on 802.11n might actually be good respectable speeds, is this true? I expected it should be closer to 150 or even 300 Mbits/sec. Perhaps I misunderstood the rating? What are your thoughts, is this a decent speed for actual throughput?

Either way I think it is obvious dd-wrt gives this router a BIG improvement in speed for 802.11n.
slaveunit
DD-WRT User


Joined: 06 Sep 2008
Posts: 163

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 22:06    Post subject: Reply with quote
Try as many other channels as you can. Just because you see SSIDs in certain channels doesnt mean someone isnt running a microwave or a wireless phone in the neighborhood. So many things run on 2.4. Hell for testing even try "Auto" for the channel. I get between 64 and 72Mbits on this router and the Airlink AWLH6070 one room over. I also use the direct Ralink chip drivers for the pci card and not the Airlink ones.
Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 22:10    Post subject: Reply with quote
Ah ok, good advice, I will try the other channels!

I live in a neighborhood with densely packed condos and there are at least 10 other AP's I can see in range of me with usable signal strength, so I imagine there is a lot of interference.

Slaveunit did you ever do speed tests with the router's original Airlink firmware? I'm curious if anyone else got a speed improvement from switching to dd-wrt.
slaveunit
DD-WRT User


Joined: 06 Sep 2008
Posts: 163

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 22:22    Post subject: Reply with quote
Yeah and Ill bet everyone has cordless phones too, that either run on 2.4ghz or 5.8ghz.

I have had this router for a long time (as you can maybe see from earlier pages of this thread and actually getting the router to Germany, but that's another story). So I did have it running for quite a while with the stock fw (both versions 1.00 and 1.01). Switching to dd-wrt doubled my speeds. The max I could get with the stock was about 32Mbits (4MB).
djuliette
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 15 Oct 2009
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 0:50    Post subject: Reply with quote
Finally got it to work after about an hour and a half. I should have read through more of the posts it would have saved me at least an hour.

Initially using the airlink-factory-webflash.bin and ar670w-ddwrt-webflash.bin from the router database page had the wireless working but the lan ports were not. So I recovered the stock firmware and used the firmware files from page 23 and it worked like a charm.

Now will have to see what kind of speed I can get out of it.
slaveunit
DD-WRT User


Joined: 06 Sep 2008
Posts: 163

PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 1:26    Post subject: Reply with quote
I dont even think 13064 should be posted for this router at all on the main downloads section. Its going to screw people up. I mean why post something that doesnt even work corerctly? Let people sit on the previous build until a new compile comes out. That assuming they dont look in here and get 13069.
Hellbore
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 17:36    Post subject: Reply with quote
Has anyone done any testing to see if changing the transmit power in the Advanced wireless settings actually has an effect on range and signal strength?

Also there is a 4-pin block with 1 pin missing on the motherboard, anyone know what that is for? I see whta I guess is the jtag port, anyone played with that?

Another thought, anyone know where the pins would be to rig up an SD car for jffs, or is that even working on this device?

I have an extra of these and want to try more fun stuff Very Happy
christianbiagi
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 12 Oct 2009
Posts: 9

PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 21:05    Post subject: Reply with quote
Has anyone figured what the trick is to getting encryption to work with iphone wifi? I tried wep wpa wpa2 personal tkip etc. only with no wifi otherwise it says password is wrong.
stephencw
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 16 Oct 2009
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 21:58    Post subject: Reply with quote
christianbiagi wrote:
Hellbore,

Thanks for taking the time to put down what worked for you. I should note that i didn't ever upgrade firmware wirelessly. I wasn't doing anything wrong that i know. I think that all or most of my problems were caused by using the 13064 version first. after about 15 flashes i finally found the september 24th version in the forum and that cleared it up. Again, the symptoms i had were failed network ports or at the least web page admin wouldn't connect and i couldn't ping the router. Ememergency recovery mode worked very well (over and over) at 192.168.1.10. Though at one point one of my flashes back to original firmware either didn't take or the network ports were messed up. Another time it worked fine.
So in my case, try, try again and luckily the router was recoverable. Now i will put it into service and see if wireless N performance is better than it was with airlink firmware.

I wonder how important this 30/30/30 reset is in the equation. I did that several times but it appeared not to be a factor.


I can confirm what Christian is reporting. The current release was not working for me today. However, from my initial testing the release from Sept. 9th seems to work nicely. I have yet to do anything "crazy" with the router.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/down.php?path=downloads%2Fothers%2Feko%2FBrainSlayer-V24-preSP2%2F09-08-09-r12874%2Fairlink-101-ar670w/

This is the release I used.

PS: Christian, thank you for the tip on restoring using the emergency image.
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