Cheap Lesson How much did ou pay for the one you fried? Life = The test first , the lesson later.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Josh Freeman Sent: Sunday, February 02, 2003 5:50 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [BAWUG] Help - I killed my Netgear ME102 Greetings all, Here's my situation: I intended to set up two Netgear ME102 AP's in "semi-bridge" mode; that is, leave one running in Access Point mode and set the other to Access Point Client mode. I needed to connect a small wired LAN /and/ a laptop with a wireless card to a shared broadband connection, which is why I chose that configuration instead of just setting both of them up in bridging mode. One of the AP's was bought new from a retail store; the other I got from an Ebay seller. Both AP's worked fine as stand-alone access points, although the firmware was slightly different (New AP: 1.4h.4/Used AP: 1.4h.3). However, my initial attempt at configuring one as an Access Point Client failed; the AP's did not seem to be communicating. In the process of troubleshooting this I visited the "Wap11 Hack" webpage at http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/Wap11Hack and learned that the guts of my ME102's were equivalent to Linksys WAP11s and a couple of other models. I downloaded the Atmel SNMPManager utility in order to have the additional test and configuration ability that it offers over Netgear's packaged utility. At one point, while trying to configure the Ebay AP, I chose the "Restore Defaults" option. The settings that were restored did not appear to be default values at all: the SSID reverted to "DORA", the IP address reverted to a static Class A address, etc. I also noticed that the MAC address shown by the utility did not match the one on the bottom of the AP -- the utility showed "00:00:AA:BB:CC:0D" as the AP's MAC address. I found this to be very strange, so I set out to upgrade the firmware in hopes that perhaps "normal" defaults would be restored. Netgear, however, doesn't show rev 1.4h.4 on their website (even though it came loaded in the retail AP), and Netgear's upgrade utility won't allow you to overwrite FLASH with the same version. So, I downloaded a version 1.4j.1 from the Wap11 Hack site that /theoretically/ would work on any AP with this type of hardware. It came with a utility for upgrading via Ethernet. The upgrade seemed to work correctly, but when I power-cycled the AP, it was DEAD. The power light came on, but the second LED (with the antenna symbol) did not. The Ethernet interface did not come up either (a Fluke LinkRunner shows it as an "unpowered hub"). When I attempted to connect through the USB interface, my laptop described it as an "Unknown Device" and did not load the proper driver. Thus, any attempt to use a USB utility to talk to the AP results in a "USB DFU driver not loaded" or similar message. All I could imagine was that the firmware file I'd loaded had been invalid, or that I'd loaded it incorrectly. Having nothing else to lose, I disassembled the AP in hopes of finding a reset or boot-mode jumper... anything that would let me talk to the AP at some level and re-load some valid code. No such luck. Has anyone ever killed their AP in this way? What did you do? Obviously, since this one was used, I have no warranty or any expectation of support from Netgear (although I'll probably ping them anyway). I did notice that the FLASH chip used in this unit is an Atmel AT29LV040A... which I could write to using a PROM programmer if I had the correct image. Any help would be greatly appreciated. BTW, if anyone would like to know more about the inside of an ME102 without having to rip up a functioning one, e-mail me and I'll be happy to send pictures or answer questions. Thanks, Josh Freeman freemanj at email dot uah dot edu. -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
