Asus WL-500W & Atheros wireless card

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geekas
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 4:53 am

Asus WL-500W & Atheros wireless card

Post by geekas »

Quick synopsis: How do I get an Atheros wireless mini-PCI card in a Broadcom based Asus WL-500W to work with a Backfire based Gargoyle?
Backstory:
I have an Asus WL-500W (Broadcom) equipped with an Atheros based TL-WN861N wireless card for a home Internet gateway. I need both wireless and wired LAN functionality. It runs ok with OpenWRT Backfire 10.03 rc5 with the Broadcom wireless packages (kmod-b43, kmod-b43legacy) removed and substituted with the Atheros drivers (kmod-ath, kmod-ath9k, kmod-ath9k-common). There is more detail to it but you get the idea.
But I would really like to run Gargoyle for its capability to do IP quotas followed by speed-down, just like the ISP does to me for the access I can afford in Australia. :( I can then allocate two voracious teenagers a limit and have them sped down before the ISP speeds us all down! :o I have run Gargoyle before, applying it as a set of packages over OpenWRT Kamakazie. But this older version of Gargoyle (1.2) brick-walled the access for the offender when the limit was reached which did not make for happy families either. Later versions that speed down rather than cut-off use kernal 2.6 and the updated Broadcom wireless driver for 2.6 won't work with the mini-PCI card in the WL-500W (a WL-121W based on a BCM4321 chip), hence the purchase and installation of the Atheros card which had reportedly worked for others using this hardware and OpenWRT Backfire.
When this setup worked for me using the modified OpenWRT I flashed Gargoyle 1.41 in (it is based on Backfire 10.03) and did the driver swap as I had done for Backfire but it didn't work. WHY :?: The wireless command "wifi detect" returned no results and the webpage to turn on wireless within Gargoyle hangs. So now there is a number of choices and some of you out there may save me some work pursuing blind alleys. The how-to install in the Documentation section of this website on applying Gargoyle as a set of packages still shows a source based on Kamakazie (src gargoyle http://gargoyle-router.com/packages/kam ... 9/brcm-2.4) and I am blocked from following the ftp file structure as I can with OpenWRT. Is there a source that would load Gargoyle >1.3 as a set of packages over my Arthros-modified OpenWRT Backfire 10.03 rc5 and retain the wireless functionality? Although the WL-500W has 8Mb of flash and 32Mb of RAM I suspect I would need to remove Luci to make room and prevent confusion as to who serves pages to a port 80 request. Kamakazie didn't have Luci built-in like Backfire does. But will the removal of the Luci packages break any functionality that an overlayed Gargoyle 1.4 needs?
It seems I am close to my goal of a user-volume limited wireless and wired low cost router (capital and running cost), but just missing. :x Any constructive comment will be appreciated and when I do get it working I will write a how-to for others who may be in the same boat. (Rampant net-gobbling teenagers)
-Geekas

geekas
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 4:53 am

Re: Asus WL-500W & Atheros wireless card

Post by geekas »

Here's an update:
I speculated that the Atheros driver set I was using was not correct for the version of OpenWRT Gargoyle was built on so I went back to Gargoyle 1.3.16 and confirmed it was built on OpenWRT Backfire 10.03.1 - rc5. An opkg list confirmed the packages had identical versions. I uninstalled the Broadcom drivers:
opkg remove kmod-b43 kmod-b43legacy wpad-mini
and rebooted.
I installed the Athros drivers (2.6.32.27+2011-06-22-2 the same ones that worked with OpenWRT vanilla+ Luci) one at a time:
opkg install kmod-ath
opkg install kmod-ath9k-common
opkg install kmod-ath9k
CRASH! The router reset and did not come back, even with a power reset. That gives me no chance to do any diagnosis.
I reflashed with the same and repeated the process, reseting before the kmod-ath9k and the result was the same. So near and yet so far :x.
With no replies I give up. I'm out of time. The teenagers who motivated me to investigate Gargoyle say that if there is a choice between no wireless and a quota brickwall they will have no wireless. They like to see how much they have left of the quota on the router's front page and work to that, more than being able to do it away from the LAN points and if they exceed it, still getting e-mail and facebook.
If I can justify $160A I will get an Infinity RouterStation Pro, put the TP link Artheros wireless card in, and use the latest Gargoyle. It should work....... :|
-Geekas

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