Monday, January 18, 2010

Linksys WRT54G2 V1 with DD-WRT (Fixing WPS lights)

I recently installed DD-WRT micro SVN revision 13064 firmware on my Linksys WRT54G2 V1 router and the first thing I noticed was that the Wireless Protected Setup light turned orange (or amber) instead of green, so I wanted to bring it back to it's original color, doing some research at DD-WRT forums I found a way to turn off the amber light and with just a bit of experimenting I finally was able to turn the green light back on, so for anyone interested here are the commands:

gpio enable 3
gpio disable 2

But I found out that after using the commands if the router was restarted the light would go back to orange, so in theory the way to fix this would be to add the commands to a startup command, to do that I went to the router's web interface, Administration/Commands and typed the commands, pressed the "Save Startup" button, and wait a few seconds for the router to restart, but to my surprise the light went back into orange.

The problem with the light was that the commands were being override somehow, the way to fix this is to make the router wait a few seconds before running the commands, here is the startup command:

sleep 20
gpio enable 3
gpio disable 2

You can change the sleep time to match better your router's startup times, I found out that my router can have this setting down to 15 seconds, that will give the amber light a couple seconds of activity only. If it's not working on your router you can set the time to lets say 60 seconds and decrease the time from there.

Now, the intention of this post is to give you a way to change the lights back to it's original colors so that's why I gave you the commands but sadly I found that after turning OFF and ON my router's wireless radio with the WPS button you have to execute the "gpio disable 2" command again, so any help will be greatly appreciated. I haven't found a way to fix this on a more permanent way, so if someone has a startup command please send it to me and I'll post it.

Also these commands will probably work in other versions of WRT54G2 routers but before experimenting remember to make a backup of the configuration file because you could potentially reset your router to it's factory defaults.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thx that worked for me :)

well done!

Anonymous said...

Orange WPS light mean WAN connection is up and running.

Helic said...

Yeah, but some find this annoying because the original firmware didn't had that orange light to show WAN activity, also some may not like the router screaming "I use DDWRT", for security reasons or who knows why.

Enkay said...

Does leaving the Amber light on have any implications on the functioning of the router?

I'm facing intermittent connections with mine, and I have just tried this and the light's turned green. I'm hoping this will solve some problems, let me run it for a day and see how it goes.

Thank you much for this!

Helic said...

No implications, if you make the light turn green and your Internet disconnects and reconnects, the light will go amber again.

The function of the amber light is to tell you the router has successfully acquired an Internet connection.

I made the tutorial because that amber light was making me nuts!

Anonymous said...

As stated by Eko here (main developer of dd-wrt):

http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=393815

You can change this permanently (at least as long as you don't hard reset) by inputting this on the command list:

nvram set connblue=1
nvram commit
reboot

this saves the changes on memory thus no need to use it as a startup script.

Helic said...

Thanks but that is for the old blue and black Linksys boxes. This post is about the WRT54G2 V1.

If anyone finds something similar for the WRT54G2 V1 feel free to post it.