Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 12:56:18 -0400
From: "Connor, Ethan M. W" <emconnor@...dersonbrothers.com>
To: 'Christer Palm' <palm@...ui.se>, bugtraq@...urityfocus.com
Subject: RE: Linksys WRT54G - Advice for european users


Another bit of warning about linksys and their inability to get the firmware
release vs. hardware version worked out correctly.  If you install the
latest WAP54G firmware update for the v2 hardware on v1 or v1.1 hardware
(which the readme says is supported)...  Expect the ethernet port to disable
itself (due to the order in which the interfaces are initialized on the
device) after you power cycle it...

It was quite a shock to discover that both the wireless and LAN ports had
the same hardware MAC address with the latest firmware, and as such the
first one to initialize was the only one working.  Connecting wirelessly to
downgrade the box to the latest v1.1 hardware specific firmware release was
the only solution...

Explaining to that god awful outsourced support why I couldn't ping the box
with my laptop connected directly to the ethernet port wasn't an easy task
either...  But that is another story entirely ("even if the mac address
wasn't the same and it was working, I can't ping 192.168.1.1 because I
assigned it a different IP address, would you like me to try and ping _THAT_
address instead?" ... "Uh, please hold, I'll ask...")  *sigh*.

After getting back into a US support queue I got someone to acknowledge that
they have seen this problem on some hardware versions, but no fixes - this
was 3 or 4 months ago...  Still no fixes.  So, for those of you who might be
thinking about a firmware update - lately it's been "proceed with
caution"...

-----Original Message-----
From: Christer Palm [mailto:palm@...ui.se] 
Sent: Saturday, June 05, 2004 7:11 PM
To: bugtraq@...urityfocus.com
Subject: Linksys WRT54G - Advice for european users


As a follow-up to the WRT54G issue...

For those of you who are looking for european firmware updates for the 
WRT54G, a word of warning might be in order:

The european firmware download pages on Linksys' homepage lists three 
separate downloads for the v1, v1.1 and v2 hardware revisions. The 
firmware downloads linked to by the v1 and v1.1 links are NOT up to date!

According to Linksys support, the v2 firmware is what you want, 
regardless of what hardware revision you have. Very confusing, but 
obviously there used to be separate images for the different hardware 
revisions, but now, a single image supports all three revisions, and the 
v1 and v1.1 links were never updated to reflect this fact.

I have only checked the european sites, but other "international" sites 
possibly have the same problem. The U.S. site is OK, though, but doesn't 
have the european version of the firmware.

Linksys support told me that they haven't had the time to fix the site 
yet, but given that the unified firmware was released in february, they 
apparantly haven't been working very hard on it.

Hopefully, they will get around to fix this when they make the update 
for the remote admin problem available. The beta posted on the U.S. 
site, by the way, doesn't seem to be available in a european version yet...

--
Christer Palm


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