Eric (and David and Mark) popped by my place this past Friday and dropped off, very kindly, a Linksys BEFSR41 router. I moved my connection from the Linux server in my closet over to my Windows box a few days ago, but the NAT within the Windows system (ICF on Windows XP Pro) was inoperable, and I got tired of the clumsy thing, so I began my search for a different way to deal with this thing. I asked Jeff, and he told me to try Eric, who had recently bought a new wireless router. Sure enough, out of his kindness, he dropped off the router Friday night and I hooked the thing up Sunday.
First I put the WAN connection (Cable modem) into the Uplink port on the back of the router, and that wasn’t working too well; then I tried the WAN port and, go figure, neither did that work! Then I remembered from the days of more copious geekdom that I had to use a crossover cable; I got one out and then hooked the thing up. The packet forwarding was a little clumsy, though, because the firmware was version 1.30 (I don’t have ver.3 of the router, I discovered).
Frustratingly, I found that the firmware would not upgrade via the Upgrade page, no matter which browser I used. I tried troubleshooting the java.io.FilePermission piece of the JRE, which didn’t work; finally I checked a page written by none other than Eric S. Raymond (Linksys Blue Box Router HOWTO), whose 31337 geekiness is all-surpassing, but that still didn’t quite work because the problem was in the failing Java (like lukewarm coffee, of course), not in the router itself. Finally, I went to the Linksys FTP site, the BEFSR41 subsection (ftp://ftp.linksys.com/pub/befsr41/), and grabbed a file called befsr41_v143_uutility.exe. This upgraded the firmware enough for me to then use the built-in Java upgrader to go from there to the very latest firmware from the Linksys website (here).
Thanks again to Eric for dropping this off, and to Jeff for originally owning it and giving it to Eric!
