WRT54GL stuck in rebooting cycle/loop

bplotkin · Post by **bplotkin** » Tue Dec 21, 2010 8:07 am

Hi everyone,

I made a MAC address change (WAN) in order to get a new IP as I usually do but this time it didn't seem to get any IP so I did it again, then again and rebooted to see if it helped and now the router seems to be stuck in a strange rebooting loop.

It will not hand out DHCP (maybe it doesn't start that service yet and just reboots again) so the only way to access the router is by setting my local IP to 192.168.1.something

Anyway I tried to tftp a new image but didn't seem to work with the windows command, also tried tftpd32 by Ph.Jounin and didn't work either, if you have any suggestions or better tftp program or any help at all will be greatly appriciated.

I was able to login to ssh and get a 'top' output

Code: Select all

Mem: 13676K used, 660K free, 0K shrd, 1624K buff, 4892K cached
CPU:  25% usr  75% sys   0% nic   0% idle   0% io   0% irq   0% sirq
Load average: 1.29 0.38 0.13 3/24 1455
  PID  PPID USER     STAT   VSZ %MEM %CPU COMMAND
 1447  1368 root     R     1404  10%   8% top
 1156   116 root     S     1600  11%   0% /bin/sh /etc/rc.common /etc/rc.d/S55b
 1455  1156 root     R     1536  11%   0% iptables -t filter -A bw_ingress -m c
  139     1 root     S     1420  10%   0% syslogd -C16
    1     0 root     S     1412  10%   0% init
 1368  1131 root     S     1412  10%   0% -ash
  116   114 root     S     1412  10%   0% /bin/sh /etc/init.d/rcS S boot
 1123     1 root     S     1412  10%   0% crond -c /etc/crontabs -l 5
  115     1 root     S     1412  10%   0% init
  281     1 root     S     1408  10%   0% udhcpc -t 0 -i eth0.1 -b -p /var/run/
  141     1 root     S     1404  10%   0% klogd
  114     1 root     S     1404  10%   0% /bin/sh /etc/init.d/rcS S boot
  117   114 root     S     1400  10%   0% logger -s -p 6 -t sysinit
 1158     1 root     S     1296   9%   0% httpd_gargoyle -c cgi-bin/**|**.sh|**
 1131  1130 root     S     1180   8%   0% /usr/sbin/dropbear -p 22 -P /var/run/
 1130     1 root     S     1120   8%   0% /usr/sbin/dropbear -p 22 -P /var/run/
  695     1 root     S      888   6%   0% /usr/sbin/nas -P /var/run/nas.wl0.pid
    8     1 root     SW       0   0%   0% [mtdblockd]
    4     1 root     SW       0   0%   0% [kswapd]
    2     1 root     SW       0   0%   0% [keventd]

If there's anything else that will help please let me know.
There's usually have enough time for one command but I can try to fit in more if needed.
Thanks again for the great software and support.

bplotkin · Post by **bplotkin** » Tue Dec 21, 2010 10:02 pm

Also forgot to mention that the scheduled reboot was set to once a week (sun 12am) and I had set it back to no schedule.

I worked it out to be around 30 seconds that I can access the router until it reboots again, SSH or web interface so I know the hardware should be fine (unless it's a very strange hardware bug)

Still I don't have much knowledge of this firmware's inner workings so I need help with this, tried to pull off more information (placed it here so it will not clutter this post)

Hoping someone has an idea how to restore the firmware or re-flash it.

Thanks!

Post by **pbix** » Wed Dec 22, 2010 10:35 am

During your 30 second window try to run the below command which should restore all the default settings on your router. Then after the next reboot it should hopefully be OK.

/usr/lib/gargoyle/restore.sh "/etc/original_backup/backup.tar.gz" "0"

Let me know how it works.

bplotkin · Post by **bplotkin** » Wed Dec 22, 2010 3:48 pm

thank you! thank you! thank you! x10
pbix saved my router!

first time i saw the html code but didn't complete, second time was the charm and saw the successful part!

Need to save this command somewhere in the docs

if anyone interested in the output here it is:

Code: Select all

root@Gargoyle:~# /usr/lib/gargoyle/restore.sh "/etc/original_backup/backup.tar.g
z" "0"
Content-type: text/html

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<body>

<script type="text/javascript">top.restoreSuccessful("192.168.1.1");</script>
</body></html>

thanks again!

bplotkin · Post by **bplotkin** » Wed Dec 22, 2010 11:22 pm

Last thing on this thread is to understand what I learned from this:

1. There's some kind of bug when changing MAC then changing reboot schedule, then rebooting that puts the router in this reboot cycle/loop. Maybe this will be hard to pin point so if it's not common problem we can't do much about it.

2. Why was I unable to upload new firmware using tftp?

3. Learned the restore command which is very good to know

And I guess that's it for now.
Thanks again to everyone developing the firmware and of course pbix for helping in the rescue!

Gargoyle Forum

WRT54GL stuck in rebooting cycle/loop

WRT54GL stuck in rebooting cycle/loop

Re: WRT54GL stuck in rebooting cycle/loop

Re: WRT54GL stuck in rebooting cycle/loop

Re: WRT54GL stuck in rebooting cycle/loop

Re: WRT54GL stuck in rebooting cycle/loop