Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2010 3:56 Post subject: need help REing a Rosewill RNX-N400LX, Realtek 8196B
I bought these routers to use as disposable APs (not routers, my DDWRTed WRT54GL works very well) until 4x4:4 N hardware comes out.
This thread
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=71960 didn't go very far. I was disappointed to learn there was were no 3rd party firmwares for this router, so I've decided to help along the process.
The FCCID for the router is VYTLP-8616, in the smallest point size in the world, with my young eyes. Loopcomm is apparently the OEM. Its a 1R1T router. The PCB has provision for 2 antennas. The 2nd blank external antenna connector would have obviously been coaxed back to the radio area since there are no traces. There are 2 chips missing, I guess they would have allowed the 2nd antenna to exist. The manual on FCC.gov says its a 1T2R router, so I guess that would've been the 2 antenna N mode. The case has no screws, if you know where to press you can open it with just your fingers
I got the serial port working. Had to solder headers on. No JTAG header on the board from the pics obviously. The middle 2 pins have no continuity to ground with voltmeter, so I guess they are NC. Power pin is 3.3v. GND is next to it. Last 2 pins are serial data. Used a USB TTL adapter to do all my work. I get the prompt at end of booting if I have the serial port attached. Thanks faceless asian firmware developers!
Rosewill didn't post the GPL sources for the router, but I found a router manufacturer that posted the GPLed sources for the RTL8196B. Seems to include the wifi driver source code in it too, and a bunch of other source code for other realtek drivers of the router (clock/timer, CPU, interrupts, LEDs, power management, etc). The kernel in this gzip has squashfs with LZMA. Supposedly by the official LZMA project.
You can dump the flash chip with /dev/mtd using the serial port. The begining looks like the Realtek bootloader ("version 1.4" string is same as on boot message), I also saw the config file, and I saw the bzip, and the kernel header. Notably, searching for "sqsh" didn't find anything.
edit: turns out you can run commands through the web GUI, no serial console required, goto 192.168.X.X/syscmd.asp , commands must be done in 1 line, ';' works for being able to do a cd and then an echo * on the same line
Last edited by patcat88 on Tue Oct 05, 2010 4:32; edited 1 time in total
