Because it's an unregulated supply; 14-17v is common for a 12v unreg. As the load (current) increases, the voltage drops. Naturally, regulated supplies are more expensive to make. Out of all the older Linksys routers I've had, only one (for the GSv6 I think) is regulated. Measure it when you plug it in; it will drop then slowly come up as boot completes.
I see. thanks for the solid info.
jwh7 wrote:
Most likely it's inductor ringing; that's why they usually have epoxy (or hot glue) on the coils.
I noticed the hot glue there when replacing caps but I never knew exactly why until now.
so basically it's got nothing to do with the router dying, thankfully
but I am not worried as it's faint to where I can't hear it unless I my my ear really close to the router.
p.s. but I noticed when removing the caps and installing new ones into the WRT54GS v1.1 router things went much smoother this time around when I added a tiny bit of solder to the end of the soldering tip as it seems to help transfer heat a bit better into things that way and you can really feel when the solder is soft as things slide in much easier with just a little pressure on the cap when installing or pulling a bit when removing and I just alternate a little between each capacitors prongs until it's out.
jwh7 wrote:
That would be difficult since there isn't a build for it (no k2.4).
I assume that's probably why it's unstable? (come to think of it... it's a bit embarrassing as I am starting to think that may have been my problem the entire time lol (still, replacing caps helps ensure it's good for many years to come and was a little learning experience etc) )
because for the most part it works but does have trouble keeping a solid uptime to where, at least on the ASUS router(but given what you said I am assuming WRT54GS will be basically the same), it was losing uptime once every day to several days.
jwh7 wrote:
GSv1.1 defaults to 216? The specs I've seen still show 200 until the GSv2. Granted, the manuf sometimes changes things leading up to model rollover. Is the S/N prefix CGN2, or did you change the CFE? Did you add a heatsink? As I said, the BCM4712 was specs at ~250 with a heatsink. I ran my GSv1 at 264 actually, but 240 is a good default due to the pll tables. Last I knew, DD did not set clkfreq correctly for the v1 (perhaps fixed with v1.1) and the CFE did not failsafe, thus bricking until I fixed it via serial. There's an old tomatousb post I made about it...
Ah ha, ref'd here:
https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1060781#1060781
I guess I must have mid-read you on the 252Mhz thing as I thought one could use passive cooling (i.e. stock cooling without a heatsink) up to 250Mhz range. but since you just mentioned that it appears what I am experiencing is normal with 240Mhz being THE limit on passive cooling, correct?
as far as the CFE, the only thing I did was this years ago now... https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=143775 ; but I just made a recent post at the end of that as I just noticed when backing up the CFE from the router hours ago that it's size is a tiny bit smaller than it originally was.
but speaking of that stuff... I assume without a proper failsafed CFE, if I try to overclock beyond a certain point it will lock and basically brick the router? ; like, with a properly setup CFE it will reset Mhz back to a safe setting should a overclock cause it to freeze up etc. because that's the impression I got from reading around a bit.
EDIT: I just noticed after I let the WRT54GS router sit there for a day(was a bit over 24 hours), just to see if the 240Mhz overclock was fairly stable, which it appears to be, I then went to 'Administration > Factory Defaults' tab and applied that and after a reboot I got to reconfigure everything as expected. but... I noticed the 240Mhz overclock REMAINS instead of shifting back to 216Mhz. then I decided to try holding reset button for 30+ seconds at which point it does reset the WRT54GS v1.1 back to 216Mhz. _________________ Primary Router: Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 /w dd-wrt.v24_mini_generic (r46640 May 13th 2021) ; new Panasonic capacitors Feb 11th 2020 | Backup Router: Linksys WRT54GS v6 /w dd-wrt.v24_micro_generic (r46640 May 13th 2021)
things went much smoother this time around when I added a tiny bit of solder to the end of the soldering tip
You're welcome... and wow that's a long sentence...
ThaCrip wrote:
Yeah, I think it was 200Mhz but they changed it to 216Mhz due to some wireless instability
Ya, I'm aware of that, but hadn't heard of it on the v1.1. Toastman actually refers to the failsafe issue in that link, but I think it was fixed for the v1.1. (see below)
ThaCrip wrote:
I guess I must have misread you on the 252Mhz thing as I thought one could use passive cooling (i.e. stock cooling without a heatsink) up to 250Mhz range. but since you just mentioned that it appears what I am experiencing is normal with 240Mhz being THE limit on passive cooling, correct?
The heatsink thing I mentioned was that the old BCM47x2 chips were orig spec'd w/ one at 250, but 535x chips didn't. The clock limit is dependent on the individual chip (and voltage, etc), plus other components esp on older hardware. And as Toastman noted, he's runs hundreds of various WRT54*'s at 250.
ThaCrip wrote:
I assume without a proper failsafe'd CFE, if I try to overclock beyond a certain point it will lock and basically brick the router? ; like, with a properly setup CFE it will reset Mhz back to a safe setting should a overclock cause it to freeze up etc. because that's the impression I got from reading around a bit.
Failsafe means (as also alluded by Toastman that a wrong value is either ignored or select the nearest match) that the CFE doesn't hang if the set clkfreq doesn't match a value in the appropriate pll table. In my case (GSv1.0), it's pll table had...
So by selected clkfreq=250,125 (that most newer WRT54's used), instead of failsafing to 240,120, it bricked, and hard reset (very annoyingly) didn't fix it since the clkfreq is part of CPU init, before it even looks for a reset button input. When a device is said to have a locked clock, it means the CFE only reads it's default clkfreq (or could be hard-coded).
ThaCrip wrote:
EDIT: I just noticed after I let the WRT54GS router sit there for a day(was a bit over 24 hours), just to see if the 240Mhz overclock was fairly stable, which it appears to be, I then went to 'Administration > Factory Defaults' tab and applied that and after a reboot I got to reconfigure everything as expected. but... I noticed the 240Mhz overclock REMAINS instead of shifting back to 216Mhz. then I decided to try holding reset button for 30+ seconds at which point it does reset
That's is entirely expected, a GUI reset doesn't clear the clkfreq nvram parameter (and 'overclocking' in DD), so will survive a reboot. A full reset clears all nvram and then must restore certain required defaults (incl clkfreq) from the CFE, in order to boot. You can search the strings in e.g. mtd0 to see them. _________________ #NAT/SFE/CTF: limited speed w/ DD#Repeater issues#DD-WRT info: FAQ, Builds, Types, Modes, Changes, Demo#
OPNsense x64 5050e ITX|DD: DIR-810L, 2*EA6900@1GHz, R6300v1, RT-N66U@663, WNDR4000@533, E1500@353,
WRT54G{Lv1.1,Sv6}@250|FreshTomato: F7D8302@532|OpenWRT: F9K1119v1, RT-ACRH13, R6220, WNDR3700v4
Well for the moment I decided to go back to FreshTomato 2020.1 on the Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 router (I overclocked it 240Mhz from telnet prompt since the FreshTomato interface does not seem to offer any overclocking ability) as I figure having a functioning WAN DHCP auto-renew should be safer as even if the router with FreshTomato firmware had a slight uptime issue once every some odd days, besides losing my traffic data (which I would rather avoid but it's probably a better trade off than potentially having to deal with WAN DHCP renewal issues with DD-WRT), it should be 'good enough' as I never had any obvious wired/wireless issues with general internet connection as far as I noticed.
plus, I can test to see if the new Panasonic capacitors I installed on Feb 11th 2020 fixed FreshTomato's instability issues on the WRT54GS v1.1. taking a guess, probably not, but ill likely find out within the next couple of weeks and maybe even a week as if it reaches 7+ full days, it's looking positive. NOTE: ill likely edit this post to report what happened whether it's fixed and is stable or if it resets the uptime randomly within the usual 1-6 days like it was previously doing before I replaced the caps.
for those wondering how I did the overclock on my WRT54GS v1.1 on FreshTomato 2020.1 you just telnet into the router (i.e. from command prompt 'telnet 192.168.1.1' (without the ') and press enter then enter your username/password to the router) and issue the following commands...
nvram set debug_clkfix=0
nvram set clkfreq=240
nvram commit
reboot
because it seems that 'nvram set debug_clkfix=0' is critical as doing the above without that command, after the router reboots, it's still showing it's default 216Mhz. but after issuing that clkfix command above then the other ones after it and rebooting, the 240Mhz sticks as FreshTomato's interface reports 240Mhz and when I telnet back into the router and issue "cat /proc/cpuinfo" (without the ") shows 'BogoMIPS = 238.38' which is basically 240Mhz.
p.s. even a user (PGalati) over on the linksysinfo forums said that, at least in his experience, the GL routers are stable with uptime with FreshTomato but he had issues with his GS.
EDIT (Feb 25th 2020): the router lost it's uptime on FreshTomato 2020.1 around the 7 days and 2 hours of uptime range. but given DD-WRT's potential WAN DHCP renewal issue, ill just deal with it the FreshTomato 2020.1 uptime reset occasionally. I might consider trying to mess with other things to see if I can get the uptime reset to go away.
EDIT (May 22nd 2020): for those with the WAN DHCP renew issue on DD-WRT where 'Status > WAN' "Remaining Lease Time" is reaching all zero's, use DD-WRT r43192 (from May 19th 2020) (i.e. https://download1.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/downloads/betas/2020/05-19-2020-r43192/ ). NOTE: r41686 (from Dec 10th 2019), which the general word is you don't want to use builds older than r41686, may still be okay but it has the all zero's 'Remaining Lease Time' issue but it might be just a cosmetic issue since I never tested it long enough to see if my internet would go out but there is a reasonable chance it might not and that the all zero's issue is purely cosmetic (i.e. the WAN DHCP renew is actually working, just not reporting to the GUI properly). so for those who want to make sure that issue is gone use r43192. _________________ Primary Router: Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 /w dd-wrt.v24_mini_generic (r46640 May 13th 2021) ; new Panasonic capacitors Feb 11th 2020 | Backup Router: Linksys WRT54GS v6 /w dd-wrt.v24_micro_generic (r46640 May 13th 2021)
I just wanted to let others know that the following ad-blocking link (to MVPS hosts) does not seem to work... https://forum.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Ad_blocking ; I don't know the details but I suspect it's got something to do with the HTTPS connection where as DD-WRT requires HTTP(?). because I noticed even when trying to go to that site with HTTP instead of HTTPS, it seems to force HTTPS in a browser.
either way, that does not work where as the following link does... https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1198315#1198315 ; as you can see that script is not using a HTTPS connection but is HTTP instead. that one actually works as you can see shortly after booting the CPU usage shoots up for a while (roughly a couple of minutes) until it's done processing it. but I am not sure how that would fair on 16MB of RAM routers as mine (WRT54GS v1.1) is 32MB and only about 12MB of RAM or so is free. so it might not work if your router has 16MB of RAM.
p.s. I know it's working as pinging 'abcstats.com' comes back with 127.0.0.1 and ping times are "0.0xx ms" instead of 200-300ms or so when it pings the real site. _________________ Primary Router: Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 /w dd-wrt.v24_mini_generic (r46640 May 13th 2021) ; new Panasonic capacitors Feb 11th 2020 | Backup Router: Linksys WRT54GS v6 /w dd-wrt.v24_micro_generic (r46640 May 13th 2021)
Out of all the older Linksys routers I've had, only one (for the GSv6 I think) is regulated. Measure it when you plug it in; it will drop then slowly come up as boot completes.
lol (still, replacing caps helps ensure it's good for many years to come and was a little learning experience etc) )
and wow that's a long sentence... 