Unless this gets edited more, this is just Garratt’s experience with his one router. It could use some more substantiation.

Initial Setup Screen

• the default user name and password are both ”’admin”’
• When you plug your router in, and direct your browser to [192.168.1.1], you will get the default screen (not in english)
• When you click any of the buttons (I think) it runs through the initial setup. From google translate, this is just setting normalish settings.
  • just click the bottom rightmost button to agree to all the defaults.

Flashing

• download http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-wr703n-v1-squashfs-factory.bin
• upload the firmware
  • You may not be able to go directly to the http://192.168.1.1/userRpm/SoftwareUpgradeRpm.htm page, but that is the url you want.
  • You can navigate to it by clicking: 系统工具 then the submenu: 软件升级
  • The link that is displayed in your status bar is in english, so that helps.
  • When you get to the upload page, it has a box to browse and find your file. after entering that, click the bottom right button, and the confirm button on the next screen.

Verify

you should now be able to telnet into the router, and see the screen:

Trying 192.168.1.1…
Connected to 192.168.1.1.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
=== IMPORTANT ============================
Use ‘passwd’ to set your login password
this will disable telnet and enable SSH
——————————————
BusyBox v1.19.3 (2012-01-04 21:00:41 MST) built-in shell (ash)
Enter ‘help’ for a list of built-in commands.

_______ ________ __
| |.—–.—–.—–.| | | |.—-.| |_
| – || _ | -__| || | | || _|| _|
|_______|| __|_____|__|__||________||__| |____|
|__| W I R E L E S S F R E E D O M
ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT (bleeding edge, r29664) ———-

Plus a bunch of other stuff underneath.

Connecting to the internet

The software you flashed did not have a gui configuration. Also, since you don’t have multiple lan ports, it is tricky getting internet access while also talking to the router. Here one way to do that:

• setup another wireless router (or configure your existing one)
  • there may be some issue with WPA configuration when not using the gui, so I configured my original router to be unencrypted while setting up the tp-link.
  • I used the ssid tempair you can substitute in your ssid in the files below.
  • DAVE’S NOTE: I got WPA2 to work, set ‘encryption’ to ‘psk2’ and add another line, “option key YOURPASSWORDHERE”. After restarting the network, I had to manually run dhcp, eg “udhcpc -i wlan0” and then set the DNS server, eg “echo nameserver 8.8.8.8 > /etc/resolv.conf”.
• edit the /etc/config/wireless file to the following:

config wifi-device radio0
option type mac80211
option channel 11
option macaddr 38:83:45:3f:14:dc
option hwmode 11ng
option htmode HT20
list ht_capab SHORT-GI-20
list ht_capab SHORT-GI-40
list ht_capab RX-STBC1
list ht_capab DSSS_CCK-40
# REMOVE THIS LINE TO ENABLE WIFI:
#option disabled 1

config wifi-iface
option device radio0
option network wlan
option mode sta
option ssid tempair
option encryption none

• edit the ”’/etc/config/network”’ file to the following:

config ‘interface’ ‘loopback’
option ‘ifname’ ‘lo’
option ‘proto’ ‘static’
option ‘ipaddr’ ‘127.0.0.1’
option ‘netmask’ ‘255.0.0.0’

config ‘interface’ ‘lan’
option ‘ifname’ ‘eth0’
option ‘type’ ‘bridge’
option ‘proto’ ‘static’
option ‘ipaddr’ ‘192.168.2.1’
option ‘netmask’ ‘255.255.255.0’

config ‘interface’ ‘wlan’
option ‘ifname’ ‘radio0’
option ‘proto’ ‘dhcp’

• Note that an extra interface was added in ”’network”’, the disable was commented out in ”’wireless”’, and a few values were changed.z
• Before you do the next step, note that using this configuration will mean you have to re-connect to the router at 192.168.2.1
  • You may have to delete the network configuration for your wired connection to reconnect.
• This also assumes that you have a fairly standard router configuration (i.e., ip addresses given out via dhcp, in the 192.168.1.x range)
• Now apply these changes:

/etc/init.d/network restart

• once you reconnect to the router, you should be able to ping google.com

Set a root password

When you are logged into the tp-link router, set a password by running the passwd command

Installing the GUI

It is much easier changing connections via a web interface.

• LuCi is a recommended web interface for openwrt. Follow the direction in the page’s ‘Install’ section.
• opkg update && opkg install luci && /etc/init.d/uhttpd enable && /etc/init.d/uhttpd start
• You can now connect to all types of networks, so feel free to switch back to an encrypted wireless network.

Final State

To summarize: your tp-link router is now configured so:

• you can ssh into it when you are connected via ethernet
  • assuming you set the root password.
  • you ssh to [email protected]
• It will connect to your wireless network as a client
• You can change these settings (for example, so the router could act like an access point) using the gui interface