I was around a friends house sorting out his wireless aDSL router that had stopped serving up pages on the web-admin side. Although I could ping it nothing else (including it's DHCP server) seemed to be running. Just on the off-chance (and this wasn't mentioned in the badly translated manual!) I tried doing a Telnet to the gadget and discovered a micro-Unix running the the box! BusyBox is a version of Linux for running on embedded systems. It mounts the firmware for the router side of the device as a normal tarball image and it seems that had become corrupted. By forcing it to re-aquire the image and rebooting (holding down the reset button over a power-cycle) I found the gadget was restored to it's factory default.
The router was a Addon GWAR3000 aDSL 802.11g device but it has the same PCB (and hence firmware/version of BusyBox) as several other ones, including at least one Netgear. It's interesting because Adam Curry has been banging on about open-source firmware for routers on the Daily Source Code so people can spin in extra features for sharing their connections. Maybe there is more open source code running on embedded devices than we realize.
The router was a Addon GWAR3000 aDSL 802.11g device but it has the same PCB (and hence firmware/version of BusyBox) as several other ones, including at least one Netgear. It's interesting because Adam Curry has been banging on about open-source firmware for routers on the Daily Source Code so people can spin in extra features for sharing their connections. Maybe there is more open source code running on embedded devices than we realize.
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