[Cerowrt-devel] archer c7v2 gets third party unupgradable firmware

[Eric Johansson]

wdr3600 will soon be on the can't upgrade list. The first one I bought I 
made the mistake of following the open WRT instructions to upgrade to 
the current firmware which contained a lockout code. Working with with 
folks on the WRT IRC channel I was able to produce a flash image which 
had the image preamble that made it possible to bypass the lockout image 
and install openwrt.

The preamble was something like 207 bytes long but don't quote me on the 
exact length. I think I still have it somewhere on my Linux partition if 
you are interested.

On 2/14/2016 1:26 PM, Dave Täht wrote:
> A pithy note on
> https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/archer-c5-c7-wdr7500 - it contains
> a bitter "thank you" to the FCC - you can't upgrade the firmware to a
> third party anymore.
>
> I can confirm this - the archer c7v2 I got off of amazon last week has
> firmware 3.14.3, and will not take a web upload of openwrt no matter
> what I tried. I also failed to get a tftp upload to work (but did not
> try hard enough).
>
> So this rules out the netgear wndr 4300, and tp-link archer c7v2 for
> future development efforts by the bufferbloat effort.
>
> It's too bad - the cake qdisc is back at a "nearly ready" state and
> could use some performance testing and optimization on these lower end
> platforms, and I'd like to get make-wifi-fast off the ground.
>
> I guess it would be good to collect a list of those companies that are
> engaging in whole router firmware lockdown instead of just lockdown on
> the radio, so we can avoid them in the future.
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