[smshaker]

Hello All,

Recently I've bought a new belkin Belkin N Wireless Router F5D8233, and started fooling around the internet to see if I can get dd-wrt or openwrt installed on it.

I found that no one could confirm or deny its compatibilty with these projects, so I started my own research, and what I found was amazing !!!

Downloading the firmware from http://www.belkin.com/support/article/?lid=en&pid=F5D8233-4&aid=9101&scid=0
looking into it through a Hex editor, I came across these findings

The downloaded firmware file (about 2MB) could be extracted easily with winrar.

the extracted .bin file was exactly 4MB (most likely means that this box has 4MB of storage)

Looking into the extacted .bin file, it shows that it has a structure similar to filesystems would have, and it has a bootloader (uboot) with tftp support (i could read the ASCII messages in the file).

At offset 0x040000 you can see the start of a binary block with a string stating "Linux Kernel Image", the block is about 500KB.

Extracting it into a file and running the following command:

[root@svn firmware]# file kernel_image
kernel image: PPCBoot image
[root@svn firmware]#

[smshaker]

At offset 0x0E0000 you can see the start of a new binary block that exteneds to almost the end of the firmware image, with about 1.5MB of space.
This block seemed to have a header similar to squashfs, extracting the block in a file and run the command:

[root@svn firmware]# file fs
fs: Squashfs filesystem, little endian, version 3.0, 0 bytes, 346 inodes, blocksize: 65536 bytes, created: Thu Dec 13 10:25:19 2007
[root@svn firmware]#

I've been able to extract the content of the filesystem with unsquashfs-lzma from firmware_mod_tools.


[root@svn firmware]# ./src/squashfs-3.0/unsquashfs-lzma -dest extract/fs fs

created 234 files
created 30 directories
created 80 symlinks
created 2 devices
created 0 fifos
[root@svn firmware]#


running the following command to extactly know the type of CPU

[root@svn fs]# file bin/busybox
bin/busybox: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, MIPS, MIPS-II version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
[root@svn fs]#

inside I can see what seems to be a firmware for the wireless chip

etc:
RT2880_eeprom_v1_0.bin

etc/wlan:
RT2860_default_vlan RT2880_eeprom_v1_0.bin

So, what you think should be the next step?? ;)

I'm quite new to linux on embedded systems, however, I consider myself profficient in linux in general.

How should I proceed to be able to introduce new packages and services?

Any guidance would be great.

[jmh9072]

Well, if you post the FCC ID, we can see internals to check what kind of hardware we're working with here.

Belkin posting the source code will also be helpful. An email to support may speed this process up.

[Sash]

ralink basen...not supported right now

[Sash]

http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=34320