Yellow Cow Blog

Warning: This only works for Rev. B1 of the DIR-825. Rev. A1 will not work.

Since support for the D-Link DIR-825 Rev. B1 found it’s way into OpenWRT about 3 weeks ago I started playing around with it.

Here’s a little how-to on installing OpenWRT on the DIR-825. Basically it’s pretty easy. For those of you who just want to get started, I recommend the OpenWRT snapshots.

Here is what I did:

1. Press and hold the reset button until the power LED starts blinking (usually takes around 45 seconds)
2. Set your computer’s IP to anything but 192.168.0.1 in the 192.168.0.0/24 range.
3. Browse to 192.168.0.1, make sure you use Internet Explorer or Chromium here. From my experience Firefox doesn’t work.
4. Upload the openwrt-ar71xx-dir-825-b1-squashfs-backup-loader.bin image
5. Don’t be scared if the flash stops while progress is still under 100% and the box goes offline. That usually means the flash is done anyway.
6. Power cycle your box and telnet to it on IP 192.168.1.1
7. Don’t forget to set a password with passwd

Enjoy!

Restoring the original firmware works similarily: Follow steps 1 to 3 and in step 4 select the original D-Link .bin image instead.

By the way: If you prefer JFFS2 over SquashFS you can view the other images at http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/

Edit:

Because I got some comments on not being able to bring the wifi up here’s a little guide to do that:

1. Install the hostapd package:
2. opkg update
   opkg install hostapd kmod-ath9k
   
3. Then go to Network -> Wifi
4. Press Edit for the Radio controller you want to set up.
   Note: The DIR-825 has two Radios: One 2.4GHz single band and one 2.4/5GHz dual band.
   On my device phy0 (radio0) is the 2.4GHz only and phy1 is the dual-band radio
5. Enter your desired ESSID
6. As network choose lan
7. Mode: Access Point
8. Encryption: WPA2-PSK
9. Key: your WPA2 key
10. Save and apply.

Edit: I forgot to mention that you need to install kmod-ath9k (Thanks Jeroen)