linksys EA6350v2 with dd-wrt

installing dd-wrt on a EA6350v2 from linux.

So linksys hasn’t released a firmare update for the EA6350V2 since 11/2017 and it is still on a 2.6 kernel, so I wanted to try to get to a newer kernel – DD-WRT supports EA6350v1 and the forum has tale of the same version working for the EA6350v1 working on the v2 – but you need to crack the case and use a serial port to upgrade.

My original EA6350v2 didn’t have headers on the serial port – guess they saved $0.05 that day – https://amzn.to/3dyEKxe $5 .

so I bought another router one off ebay (https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=ea6350v2&_sacat=0&_sop=15) $23 – this one was built on a less cost cutting day and had the serial headers, I got a usb serial port off of ebay – something like this one https://amzn.to/2OnyKyO $6.

Then I hooked up my laptop to my “new” router via the serial port – you have to get the cover off the linksys, find the serial port – to the left of the big heat sink, the arrow marks the 3.3v pin (unused), next to that is TXD, then RXD, then GND (this is from left to right with the ports/antennae away from you. – you’re going to cross TXD from your serial adapter to RXD on the linksys, and RXD from your adapter to TXD with GND to GND.

I installed putty on linux – i know – and configured it to use /dev/ttyUSB0, 115200, 8,n,1 and connect to the serial port and voila I could watch my ea6350v2 boot and stop it during boot with ctrl + c which yeilds a CFE> prompt.

After getting the boot stopped, I connected my cross over cable between my linux laptop and one of the LAN ports on the router (not the one you connect to your cable modem/dsl box) and was able to ping 192.168.1.1 (the router) –

(i have a big box of ethernet cable and a crimper and rj45 connectors so I made my own cross over cable long ago – the router might automatically do the cross over for you or you can get your own cross over cable https://amzn.to/3fRIFbl  $5).

(My laptop doesn’t have a wired ethernet port so I used a older relative of this https://amzn.to/3sUxJNO $ 19. )

My network port was actually already configured with a 192.168.1.x address but you can just bring it up with

$ sudo ifconfig <interface> inet 192.1.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0

then on the router (via serial port) I typed:

CFE> flash -noheader : nflash0.trx

it said Reading :

then on the linux command line I typed

$ tftp 192.168.1.1
tftp> binary

tftp> put put linksys-ea6350-webflash.bin

71 seconds later the router (via serial) said programming and eventually returned to the CFE> prompt where I asked it to flash to the other location.

CFE> flash -noheader : nflash0.trx2

and I then repeated the above tftp put command

and another 71 seconds later it said programming again and after a bit returned to the CFE> prompt

after powercycling the linksys it came up running DD-WRT.

cisco ip phone 7942

checkout: https://usecallmanager.nz/

lots of funky configs out there…

If the phone is able to get its IP address over dhcp, its config via tftp, and you have a valid ntp IP address in your config file and you have connectivity to that server and the phone isn’t updating the time at boot you probably have a bug in your config file and may need to start from basics and built up slowly…

reboot sequence – hit the settings key then dial **#**

don’t use the factory reset key sequence unless you have a dhcpserver and tftp server setup and the software to put on the tftpserver … otherwise it will just spin trying to install new default software.

my big hurdle was figuring out that the proxy section of <sipLines><line button=”1″><featureID>9</featureID> wasn’t <proxy>USECALLMANAGER</proxy>

I tried to be special and add the ip address again of my sip server – the behavior of the phone in this mode is to get the SEP<MAC>.cfg.xml file, get the dialplan.xml and do nothing.

Here’s a good reference I found after I was up and running: https://blog.kmp.or.at/cisco-ip-phone-7942-w-asterisk/

usb audio fun

so I tried to reset my bios defaults earlier today to try to fix another problem that popped up and I accidentally enabled by builtin sound card… rather than rebooting to take advantage of my new /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist of snd_hda_intel, and my new /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf settings ( see: https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/solving-onboard-and-usb-sound-card-issues-in-alsa/ ) so to be able to rmmod all the sound modules (snd or snd_something I first had to kill off pulseaudio at the same time as I removed the blocking snd module in this case snd_usb_audio

#killall pulseaudio;rmmod snd_usb_audio

after that module fell I could remove all the rest in an orderly fashion. and then once the evil snd_hda_intel was vanquished I just pulled the USB sound card out and plugged it back in, voila!

installing canon printer drivers on ubuntu 20.04 without running their bash script

So I really like canon color laser multi function printers – for their full duplex color printing, their copying, for full duplex scanning to a pdf on a usb stick (scanning to sane didn’t work the last time I looked), but certainly not for installing packages via a bash script as root…

So I spent some time today finding the relevant deb file (similar named RPM if you prefer).

Untar the tar ball you got from the canon website and then

# dpkg -i 64-bit_Driver/cnrdrvcups-ufr2-us_5.20-1_amd64.deb

then install the printer under the ubuntu settings / printers

odds are that your printers’ ppd is included in the above deb file, if you happen to have trouble with that, you can look through the PPD/Debian directory for your printers ppd file.