DIR 615 E3 w/ DIR 600 A1 firmware...not saving

[DF_man]

Hi all,

I was able to get the image for the dir 600 a1 onto my dir 615 e3 as mentioned in this post: http://www.gargoyle-router.com/phpbb/vi ... f=8&t=2026

I unfortunately have a problem though, which is that the wireless and internet lights don't light up and any changes that I make in the firmware don't get saved after reboot (admin password included).

Any help or pointing me in the right direction in order to resolve these issues would be much appreciated...otherwise I need to consider ddwrt...:-/

best,
DF

[ezdi]

Your LEDs don't work because you're not running a DIR 600 A1. The GPIOs are configured differently. It shouldn't affect actual functionality. You can change the GPIO configuration with scripts, but it's not worth it because of your other problem...

Log in and type dmesg. You'll probably see a line in there similar to the:
jffs2: Too few erase blocks (3)
that I get.

The image is too large and there isn't enough space to create the JFFS2 filesystem. This is where OpenWRT (and by extension, Gargoyle) store their configuration. Fortunately this doesn't result in a brick, but it does mean that all your configuration changes are stored to a ram disk and lost on reboot.

That's the one thing DD-WRT has going for it. Configuration changes are stored in NVRAM and don't need as much space as a full filesystem. As to trying DD-WRT, I just came from there with my E1. Don't bother. I loved DD-WRT for years, but they spend all their effort adding new routers. Most of the features seem to have bit-rotted to broken-ness, and Atheros hardware is buggy. Good luck finding a build where everything works. The best build I found in terms of WiFi would had a dropbear that segfaults, a pptp server that refused connections and a pptp client that did nothing.

If I can't figure out how to get Gargoyle smaller, the OpenWRT build for the 600 seems small enough.

*Edit: 1.5.10 is 190K smaller. That's enough to give me 6 erase blocks and I can save configuration now. I suspect that firmwares larger than 3.30MB will be a problem.

[menkatek]

As I was new to OpenWrt, Gargoyle and DIR-615, it took me a while to figure out what was going on. Now that I see it can no longer create a jffs2 partition for settings, are the Gargoyle developers aware of this? From what I can tell, the OpenWrt E4 firmware is only 2883588 bytes, so the majority of the remaining firmware should be Gargoyle's stuff. Has 1.6.0 been a problem for other routers with 4 MB flash memory size?

[ezdi]

Yes, it would appear they know. See http://www.gargoyle-router.com/phpbb/vi ... =13&t=5404 over in the feature request forum. They say that it's a problem because the emergency room takes up extra space and it's not something they care about so get a new router or go away.
Near as I can tell Gargoyle is larger due to needing full versions of some network tools (and not just the busybox ones), a few extra kernel modules for QOS, etc, but that's it. I don't know why that's 600KB squashed...
Gargoyle (well, OpenWRT) currently has a script that has it mount a ramdisk as the overlay partition. If I ever am able to build Gargoyle, I'll make a version that will pre-populate the ramdisk with the contents of .tgz file that it copies out of whatever room there is for the rootfs_data.

[menkatek]

Thanks ezdi. Would there be a way to overwrite that segment of the flash memory? Or would this require soldering and JTAG?

[menkatek]

I went back to OpenWrt. I hope the developers will reconsider the flash memory of the DIR-615, and offer a reduced version of Gargoyle so it will at least fit.

[ezdi]

Thanks ezdi. Would there be a way to overwrite that segment of the flash memory? Or would this require soldering and JTAG?

You mean the "emergency room"? You can overwrite it all you want with mtd commands, but it's in the bootloader partition so you get a brick.
Add to the fact that you're only going to get back maybe 128k at most if you replace the bootloader and modify the partitions, and probably less, even if you did make it work it's not really worth it for me cause they'll blow through it with one more release.