How to Upgrade a Router // OpenWrt (How To Guide)

welcome back to dab odyssey a developer's journey through it where i cover tutorials and reviews of it tools and technologies i'm your host orest and in this episode we're going to be installing or flashing open wrt onto your old router openwrt is an open source software firmware that you can use to replace the software firmware on your old stock router this is going to be very similar to the ddwrt video i just made and most of the same concepts will apply with that openwrt is a open source software firmware so in flashing it you're also going to get benefits from the community such as their support and you're going to get enhanced security and you're going to get more capabilities than you would normally with a stock software firmware on the old router there are risks also in proceeding with this video you're going to likely void the warranty on your router so if you don't care move on next you can also potentially brick your router which means it becomes unusable there are generally ways around this or to prevent it and i recommend going to openwrt's website to figure out how to prevent that you can find that link in the description below openwrt is not compatible with all routers so i recommend you go ahead and look up the router name and model number in their database just to be sure that they do have a compatibility for it but also a software install process the software install process will likely be different depending on the router and model that you use so this video may not work for you exactly but the general concepts should apply now if you don't like open wrt you can flash it back to the stock software firmware all you'll need to do there is make sure you have a copy of that stock software firmware from the manufacturer's website and then use the same installation process or reverting process to get it back to that stock software firmware before we begin installing openwrt onto our netgear r6080 router i'd first like to show you how you can find out your router is compatible with openwrt they have their own router database as well just as ddwrt does which i mentioned in a prior video so this process will be very similar and yet it will be different because we're using a different firmware and we're using a different router just to show you guys the router i'm using is the netgear r6080 i've used this in previous videos that you can find in the links or on my channel as well and then here we're going to be flashing with openwrt in order to do that we won't be using the same way as we did with edwrt by going to the firmware interface and going to upgrade firmware page within the admin page here we're going to have to send the commands through the terminal and that's just because that's the way you have to do it with openwrt well first let's go ahead and find our model by typing r6080 and then we click netgear r6080 this will take us to its wiki page that we can use to find our instructions on performing the firmware flash so in this case in order to do this firmware flash we're going to need a software called nmrp flash tool the nmrp flash tool is a tool that we will be using to send commands or packets to the router to tell it what firmware to use on boot or on start this is what we will be using to send that actual firmware file to this router when we start it up so the installation is going to be very simple but first we're going to gather the necessary materials here we will need our firmware snapshot which here you can see we have the whole link to it and we have the squash hfs factory image that's the one we're going to be using first then later in the video we're going to be using this one which is the sys upgrade dot bin which is an upgrade to the firmware then we're going to need this tool as well the nmrp flash if you go ahead and click it you will be taken to a github page and here you'll be able to actually use this to find the binaries that you need so if you're on windows you may have to use it differently than if you're on mac os or on linux but here he has a compiled binary already for us to use that we could just download so i've gone ahead and actually downloaded that compiled binary which makes it easier to use rather than compiling it ourselves as you can see here this line here we click that and then we'll get the compiled binary so mine i just downloaded the mac one then in addition we're going to want to use or find the router oem firmware this is always something you should have just in case you don't like what you have and you want to revert back so if you click to the downloads here we'll be able to find the firmware current version and we could download that version which i've already downloaded that as well so now let's go back and then we have our instructions to continue so i'm going to open up this nmrp flash tool in another tab because we will be using some instructions from there but ideally the rest of this i'm going to be showing you from the terminal page all we will need to do is use this nmrp flash hyphen l command that will tell us what the interface name is that is attached to our netgear router we're going to need to do this while it's plugged in and it cannot be done wirelessly so make sure you have an ethernet cord connected between the two then once we know the interface we just use the hyphen i interface name and then hyphen f for file and then the firmware to flash when you do this command it's going to wait for physical connection this is then when you actually turn the router on and then at some point you're going to see this information show up in the console which will tell you that it's performing the flash then once you see reboot your device now it's safe to reboot and then you'll be fully flashed with open wrt now in addition to this we are going to be needing a outside internet connection or some sort of connection to the internet in order to continue configuring this router we do not have a default web user interface for this router we have to actually install it and with that we're going to have to install it from the internet the web interface for this is called lucy or luci and we will need to use the internet in order to get that so i have prepared that by having a ethernet cord connected to the wan port and then another ethernet cord connected to a lan port connected to my computer which is how the install will be done now that we've done all these things i'm going to plug in my router and plug it into the internet and then plug it into my computer then i will be initiating these commands and right when i initiate the command is then when i'll turn on the router so that we can get started now that we're in the terminal we're going to go ahead and issue those commands that we'll need to find the interface name and then the command to do the flash now that the router is on first i'm going to change my directory to the downloads directory where i have the nmrp flash binary so as you can see this folder i have that nmrp flash binary and first in order to initiate the command i will do a period forward slash an mrp flash and then hyphen l so as you can see i'm expecting to get an ip address of 192.168.1.2 and i know it's connected to the interface en8 so that's what i'm going to be using to issue the command so now in order to issue the command i'm going to shut the router back off and i could do that by unplugging it or pressing the power button so i've gone and pressed the power button to stop it then i will initiate this nmrp command then i do hyphen i for the interface en 8 for the actual interface name hyphen f for file and then the actual factory image in this case that will be this one right here now that i have this all set up i can go ahead and press enter but first for my memory i know i'm going to have to elevate my privileges in order to do this command so i'm going to do sudo for this i'm not sure how it'll be on windows if it's going to be similar but i know with mac os that's the way you have to do it it's waiting for a physical connection and i turned the router back on so now it's going to wait until it gets connected and then you can see it's already getting started with flashing the firmware so from here all we're going to do is wait until we get a reboot now from the actual program that lets us know we're ready to reboot the router and that it has open on it i would also advise you to not do this earlier at all because if so you may end up breaking your router but luckily with this nmrp tool you can get around that by just trying to flash it again but ideally there should be no power changes or this router should not be shut off or you should not cancel this command while this is happening it may take some time about a few minutes but you will be certain to know that it'll tell you when it's ready for a reboot now as you can see we get the remote finished and reboot your device now so that means we are ready to restart the router so i'm going to go ahead and do that by turning off the power and turning it on now that we've gone ahead and power cycled it we should be able to log in to the admin interface using ssh so if you're using windows you will have to find a way to ssh into it something like putty is a program that will be able to do that for you now we can see that our router is ready because we've been assigned an ip address so you could check this if you're using a macro using ifconfig at which point you'll see that we've received another ip address on that interface or you can look at your network settings to see if you've got an ip address now that we know we're up in live we can go ahead and perform an ssh command to log in to the router so that we can start configuring it so here we just do ssh root at 192.168 and here we will not require credentials to start now if it has to establish the authenticity just say yes and as you can see we have open wt installed and as they say wireless freedom so from here the next thing we're going to want to do is a command that will reset the package overlay that's because we want to be sure it's cleared out of anything else just in case you don't have to do that i noticed from my own testing but i followed the instructions that provided so i will go ahead and be doing that you can find that command right here which is jff s to reset and then we'll be doing a reboot here it's just going to tell you it's erasing the settings and packages on there which will click yes because we haven't done anything and then we'll do a reboot now that the reboot's occurred we can go ahead and log in the same way we had before you may get some interaction in a negative way with this and by that i mean you may get a conflict so what i do best for this is i delete the actual authenticity verification in the known hosts file just in case so i don't have to run into that problem all the time so here i'll do this with a vim command to open the file and then i will go ahead and delete that entry now we can go ahead and perform the same command and we should get in just fine so next now that we've done that all we will need to do is an o package update and then an o package install lucy this is where it's going out to the internet and it's downloading all the packages that are available for open wrt now that that is completed we can do an o p k g install lucy and this is what it's going to install our web gui interface that allows us to interact with open wrt in a much more pleasing way it's not to say that i hate the terminal but it is much more convenient in my opinion to use the graphical user interface that they provide but not necessary once this install is complete without any errors we can go ahead and go to our web browser and log in with the default ip address of 192.168.1.1 so we go http one nine two one six eight one one and as you can see it's ready for us to log in so first we'll log in and in order to get this error message away i'm just going to set a quick password we could do that here by going to the system administration and then by putting a password in here so now this gets rid of that that warning message we were talking about next what we want to do in here is then do the upgrade here it's going to be very similar to what we have done with ddwrt where there is actually an administration page and a firmware upgrade page that allows us to upload it so let's go ahead and do that right now and here in system we click backup flash firmware then in here we could do flash image we'll browse and then we'll go to the location where we have our flash file in this case we want to be sure that we're using the sys upgrade bin and not the factory flash now we choose this for upload and then click upload and then at some point it's going to perform another restart first we're going to click continue before that happens and in this case what will happen is this will kind of get stuck on this same page which is fine as the router actually restarts so what you will want to monitor is the actual network connectivity on your network page to see when you lose your ip address and then when it comes back if it doesn't come back and you get something like a self-assigned ip address that's okay because you can go ahead and restart it by pressing the power button just to be sure that you connect again if you do not see anything change then i would recommend at least waiting for around five minutes for this process to actually take place you do not want to disrupt this process while the firmware is being flashed for me i usually had to wait a few minutes and i did see the network connectivity go down and then come back up that is the best indicator you'll have as this page does not change now from my end i can see that i received a new ip address so i'm ready to just do a refresh to get back to the interface just as i suspected we do not have lucy installed again so we will need to go back into the system so now in order for me to log back in i will just use this command so now that we've gotten in all we need to do is perform those same commands however before i do that i'm going to do a quick check just to be sure that we don't have some old configuration files there that will be reinstalled when we reinstall lucy in this case i just do a mv command which will actually do a move or you can also change the name of a file and here we're going to be looking for the lucy file now i'm just going to change that to a old just so that it reflects that it's the older version that we had and not the newer one this same thing is going to need to happen with the httpd file now that those two have been done we just need to do an o package update and then after this update completes we're going to do the install one more time now that it's completed let's go ahead and do opkg install lucy this will then go ahead and just do the same thing as we've done before and install the luci package now you may have noticed that i'm actually connecting to the router interface only using http you could actually install a package called lucy hyphen ssl that allows you to connect to it using https i'm not going to go over that in this video just for the sake of a basic configuration but in future videos i will be going over that and how to configure your open wrt router now you can see that we're done and just to verify that it worked we can go ahead and go back to our browser delete everything else and as you can see we're ready to go back in so now at this point this is where you can start configuring your router or making changes now lastly if you do want to go back to your old router firmware you can do this likely one of two ways so you can go ahead and go to system and then backup flash and do a flash image here which will go ahead and then actually send the firmware to the router to then perform a flash however you could also doing it using the nmrp command which i will show you that way as that's the way i did it the command is going to basically stay the same we're just going to provide it a different file so in order to flash the firmware back to its original stock we're just going to find that old command we used and then replace the file with the factory firmware file that will then go ahead and flash it back to the original netgear router firmware that it came with so here i've already prepared this command for you i have a folder where i have that r6080 factory image imaging and at this point all we need to do is click enter and then we will wait now that we have the router shut off just to be sure that it doesn't interfere with the process we will then turn it on when it waits for the connection turn the router on and then eventually you will see that this terminal will start showing a connection and therefore performing the flash now that the router has responded we know we are ready to reboot it and then once we reboot it we should be able to access the netgear interface that came with it installed so now we shut it off and then turn it back on now that i see that we've been assigned an ip address again that means the router is back up and we're ready to log in and this is just for a verification just to show that it actually happened so now as you can see it's already forwarded to the netgear r6080 firmware at which at this point it's going to ask me to do all the prompts from a base install of the factory firmware and with that that covers everything that we're looking to in this video as noted earlier we will be going and showing you different ways to configure your open wrt router in later videos thanks for following me in my journey i appreciate it if you like this video go ahead and give it a thumbs up and if you like this content or other content around it tools and technologies especially around networking network hardware routers etc go ahead and subscribe to my channel and click that bell for notifications so you don't miss the next one now would you use openwrt or would you use the features that you can get with it would you even consider flashing it and moving ahead with this process let me know in the comments below and i'd love to have a conversation with you thanks and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Dev Odyssey

Views: 31,919

Keywords: flash router, flash router with openwrt, how to flash netgear router, how to flash netgear router with openwrt, how to flash openwrt, how to flash openwrt firmware, how to flash openwrt netgear, how to install openwrt, how to install openwrt on netgear router, how to remove openwrt, how to remove openwrt from router, netgear router install openwrt, nmrpflash netgear, openwrt flash firmware, openwrt flash original firmware, openwrt flash router, nmrpflash netgear openwrt

Id: 1IgwDwoa9yY

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021