Hacking WRT54G

I've bought Linksys WRT54G for my home wireless network a while ago. As the 11g spec has been final, I went to Linksys site to find the updated firmware and downloaded the new 1.30 version. From their download page, I found a GPL link at the bottom. Following the link, it listed out all source code used by this router. Hey! My box runs Linux!

Afterwards, I googled "WRT54G Linux" and find some interesting information: somebody are discussing on how to hack WRT54G! One of the guy is Rob Flickenger, the author of Building Wireless Community Networks. The recent weblog entries from Rob is on Oreilly Network:

• Is Linksys shirking the GPL?
• Linux on the Linksys

He later on posted a wrtgen perl script in NoCat
mailing listfor extracting the file system from the firmware. I tested it and it works. However, I examined the file system but it's not very useful. There seemed something hided in /tmp or elsewhere, which is unable to find in the firmware.

According to Rob, there is still some ways to hack this box, and could run some commands using the ping util in the web interface of the router. And there is another guy can run a shell! But for me, hacking it is farr too dangerous for me at the moment, or I will ruin a working router. But I would just like to wait and see what happen next...

I recalled that it's Rob that inspired me about his wireless book. And later on I bought one net4501 and net4521 embedded board from Soekris for testing. Thanks Rob and keep going!