Last night, it was determined by the post-mortem investigatory team (me) that this Tuesday, as we sat through a horrible storm at the about-to-be-cancelled Def Leppard/Styx/Foreigner concert, a friend of mine was experiencing injury so grievous it would lead to their death two days later. That friend was my Linksys WRT54G version 2.
Here it is on the floor of the O.R. Still opened up after trying to shock its heart back into beating, vibrant life…
It was too little, too late. I was able to get the router to answer my computer’s pleas of “are you there?” through the method of sticking a wire to the antenna connector and carefully touching pin 16 of the flash chip with it. It wouldn’t take new firmware though. (I was patient, and tried many times from a Linux and a Windows system.)
Kaycee was nice enough to pick up the slack-jawed toothless cousin (version 8.) of this wonderful bit of hardware. It does its job as a wireless router, no doubt… but with half of the memory and storage space and none of the ability to run a Linux-based OS, all of the neat network monitoring and other bells and whistles I had set up on the old version won’t be happening with this clown! Sadly, the only things today’s Linksys wireless routers have in common with the ones back then are their most basic functionality and looks. Cisco has heartlessly dumbed them down.
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