DI-624M Un-brick HOWTO

Lemon to Linux Appliance v0.1

Background

My initial goal was to provide the best possible wireless solution to enable my uPNP Media Player to connect to a media server with all my media at the opposite end of my house. Current Linux support for Atheros technology, experience with Atheros technology and market adoption of Atheros based devices led me to the DI-624M as an ideal device to bridge my existing SuperG adapters and future MIMO based adapters I plan to switch to. My DI-624M with new firmware is awesome and boasts great speed and range; Much better than any non-MIMO AP, and even with my non-MIMO PCI and PC-Card adapters

Purpose

There are a lot of DI-624M bricks/lemons out there. The reality is, if you can get to the Emergency Flash prompt, indicated by a flashing status light
after powering on with the reset button pushed, you can probably fix your DI-624M to be a great wireless router

D-Link have not helped themselves by providing incomplete support information, shipping RMA refurbished units with old firmware, and generally confusing people about their MIMO and non-MIMO products

The community has also fallen into the black hole, and I’m here to tell people, this can now be a great product

Did I mention that it is also a linux device, and like many other BusyBox based products, the source for the GPL’d parts can be found on Dlink’s site. Props to D-Link for their effort in product development - I’ll crutch their support for now.

What I Discovered

The DI-624M overheats easily, especially if you leave it sitting flat on a table - Use the feet, or prop it up!

The DI-624M requires firmware v1.2 or newer to operate properly - v1.2 works great! Anything earlier is junk, you must upgrade. The details on this are in the text file that comes inside the firmware.zip file.

The DI-624M cannot be flashed when it is hot - Power it off for a day, flash it immediatly on cold start!

The DI-624M has an upgrade procedure that takes time, and the procedure is not well documented - Read on!

I bought a brick on ebay, and fixed it up in a jiffy - once I had the procedure figured out.

Common misconceptions

Many, Many people have disabled their DI-624M trying to upgrade it to v1.2 without the correct procedure. Maybe you picked up one of these on the cheap from eBay like I did?

At one point, as indicated in the changelog, the release number did not change, but an upgrade issue from a specific firmware was resolved. Whatever the case, they all work now.

A Word on D-Link Support

The DI-624M is only available from the US in North America, and US 1-800 support number does not work outside the US.

Inside the US, there is no document that allows D-Link to help you, until now. Hopefully their tech support has a web browser. The process below will probably be updated. This is a first draft.

How To Recover your DI-624M

So you power it on, and get a solid yellow status light. Great. Think you have a brick? Wrong.

1. Download the D-Link firmware, unzip it, and have the .bix file handy. This is your firmware. You do not send the .zip file to the device. You will need the .bix file from inside the compressed .zip file.
2. Configure your network interface to 192.168.0.2, netmask 255.255.255.0. You need to be on the 192.168.0.0/24 subnet to send the firmware to the DI-624M which will be at 192.168.0.1 in recovery mode.
3. Configure your WINDOWS system tray to show your network interface activity -> this is important to know the flash is transferred.
4. Make sure your DI-624M is cool. I did mine on a cool fall day after leaving it off for a day. Hot flash does not like being written to. I had the hood on mine open, and had it on for five minutes before flashing it. Anyone with a fan has no worries whatsoever. If your hood isn’t open, don’t set it flat on the table, install the D-Link feet, or prop it up on the four corners.
5. Power-On, holding down the reset button. When the status light is flashing, you are ready to go.
6. Open IE on Windows. Not Linux (I only have Linux, and had to use my girlfriends wife’s windoze laptop) as the DI-624M does not like unix paths, and will report “Invalid Image File Selected”.
7. Navigate to 192.168.0.1 in your web browser; You should get the flash recovery dialog box, with Browse and Send buttons.
8. Enter your .bix image file and press “Send”. Your network lights (TX/RX) should go solid for a second or two, and then the page should go to the default IE “Page Not Found”
9. If your network lights didn’t both go on for a second, then you may not have transferred the image. You have to reset the device and start over. I observed the solid network connection lights on my second try. Sometimes the transfer does not happen, this is a small bug in the flash recovery web server, easily overcome with retries. If the next three steps happen, it worked fine.
10. After the flash, the status light goes on solid. Don’t worry. Wait.
11. After 0-3 minutes, the status light goes off. Don’t worry. Wait.
12. After about 15 mintues, the status light starts flashing again. If this happens, you are in the clear. JUST WAIT. I think these times vary with the heat of the device, but I’m not sure.
13. At this point, I could ping 192.168.0.1, but could not get the web interface. If this happens, you have fixed your router. JUST WAIT
14. Go to bed, then to work, and when you come home, check the web browser at 192.168.0.1. TADA It works. At least three people have reported 17hrs+ for the device web interface to come up for the first time. I have no idea why, but this long timeout is clearly an issue.
15. Your Lemon is no more. Your range is great. You are very happy to have bleeding edge MIMO technology that works. (Rangebooster are out now too, the next increment in Atheros 802.11n reference design)

I only have one of these, and I use it all the time, so I have yet to go back through the process and verify/clarify. But I will soon and perhaps pick up a few more on ebay for family and friends. Feel free to ping me at imac@URL regarding this. As of 11/30/06 I have received numerous success stories from users.