ruzee.com - Steffen Rusitschka

I’ve had trouble with random lockups/freezes on my nForce4 based Asus A8N-SLI Premium mainboard since the beginning. I first thought it was related to my Asus 6600 graphics card - using the open-source nv driver instead of the proprietary Nvidia driver on Linux made things better, but didn’t solve it completely. The system simply stopped responding once in a while and a hard reset was necessary.

A month ago I changed the HyperTransport frequency from 1 GHz to 800 MHz in the BIOS and everything works smoothly since. So if you experience similar problems - give it a try.

Tags: nforce4, nvidia, asus a8n sli premium, random lockups, random freezes

I thought it was gone. Forever. My Linksys WRT54G v1.1. But let me start from the beginning: I read that the OpenWRT White Russian release 0.9 got final. I was using the original Linksys Firmware before so I thought I’d give it a try by flashing the end user version of OpenWrt, x-wrt, via Web-Update.

The update worked like a charm, but it looked to me as if x-wrt doesn’t come with a firewall (accessing the external IP address from my private network gave me the adminstration web GUI… - an iptables configuration problem, which I figured out much later), so I kind of paniced (yeah…) and tried dd-wrt.

I installed dd-wrt via x-wrt’s Web update and everything went smooth. Until I rebooted. I could no longer access it, even ping ended up with “Destination host unreachable”. Now, boot_wait is bliss. I turned it on a while back. Fortunately.

So I tried to flash the original Linksys firmware via TFTP. But the transfer stopped after some time without completing - after some tries I gave up and found an explanation on openwrt’s web page:

There is a physical limit of approximately 3,141,632 bytes that CFE/PMON will accept during the boot_wait stage.

Great. But wait, the image of x-wrt is smaller than that. I tried to flash this one via TFTP and that did the trick. It’s admin page was accessible and I was able to flash images via Web-upload. I was happy. My device was ok again, I figured out x-wrt does have a firewall and it was working, which you should never change

After a day or so however I found out that x-wrt runs pretty unstable. Port forwardings blocked, the NAT was slow, etc. so I gave dd-wrt another try. It booted, no ping again. But I saw that the device was actually running ok. The LEDs looked fine. Booting seemed to have finished.

Now here comes the trick: dd-wrt (and the original Linksys firmware as well) comes with resetbuttond enabled. And if you press the reset button for approx. 30 seconds, it resets all settings back to the “factory defaults”. I tried it, after some 20ies seconds the four ethernet port LEDs lighted up like a fireworks and the device rebooted - with clean settings - and there it was: dd-wrt’s web admin page!

So basically, here are some tips if you regularly update firmwares:

• Always have boot_wait enabled
• Always have a firmware image available that’s smaller than 3 MB
• Whenever your device’s NVRAM settings got messed up, flash the original firmware or dd-wrt and reset the settings to their factory defaults via the reset button
• Give x-wrt some more days to get stable

Tags: linksys, wrt54g, flash, openwrt, x-wrt, dd-wrt, firmware, revive

ruzee.com is currently hosted at my home, in my small computer and visitors room, using a DSL connection. Until you as one of my visitors reach my site, all the data has to go through a DSL modem/splitter, a NAT/Firewall, a 4-port switch, and finally the server itself. Loads of components that, well, might crash, get disconnected, etc.

But, fortunately Montastic exists. It frequently checks your servers for their availability. It does that approximately every 15 minutes - so you won’t get real-time data, but hey it’s free! If something is not o.k. (or working again), Montastic sends you an e-mail.

Tags: server, monitor, availability, montastic