OpenFonera

After receiving my second La Fonera I was brave enough to flash OpenWRT Kamikaze. The used HOWTO described it very well and it worked without problems.

Now my first La Fonera serves a FON hotspot and my private (bridged) LAN. The second La Fonera is connected to my privat LAN via WPA over the first La Fonera. Now I can play with OpenWRT (Kamikaze) on my second La Fonera.

The described method uses the RedBoot shell. I don't know exactly how RedBoot works and wonder if it is possible to rescue the La Fonera in any case (wrong flashing, wrong configuration, ...). If anyone knows, please tell.

OpenWRT for the La Fonera?

It is nothing new, that the firmware for the La Fonera is based on OpenWRT. But in the last few days the developers are making progress to get OpenWRT running on the La Fonera. I found an interesting thread on the OpenWRT forum. The developers added support for Atheros based devices (La Fonera, Meraki) to the Kamikaze (the experimental branch of OpenWRT). So don't grab the sources, compile it and flash it, unless you know what you are doing.

My advice: Be patient and stay tuned!

Code injection without the FON servers

Stefan and me have written another script to open your La Fonera. It works with the firmware version 0.7.1 rev 1. The script and more information is available here.

UPDATE: There are now two scripts available. One for the new and one for the old firmware version.

Have yourself some happy holidays and Merry Christmas!

ipkg of the La Fonera broken?

Before christmas a new post. There are some issues with the ikpg system of the La Fonera. You can use repositories like this, this and this. I installed successfully e.g. the wol (Wake On Lan) package with ipkg install wol after adding one of the repositories above. But after executing ipkg remove wol it took too long, so I hit Ctrl-C. ipkg started to delete the /usr/bin/ directory. There is something wrong with the ipkg version of the La Fonera. USE IT WITH CAUTION! I will try to investigate this issue.

Hmm, it tried to install and remove a package again - without a flaw. Last night I did it, and the /usr/bin was partly deleted. The difference between the two cases: Last night I was a little bit impatient and hit Ctrl-C.

So my advice, keep it running and be patient. :)