As I type this my internet connection is being once again powered by my DG834G. It's also very dark, but that's because I'm observing Earthhour (I don't think it'll change the world, but I don't mind sitting in the dark that much and there's only me in the house).

After my last OpenWRT/AR7 experiment I thought I'd bricked the Netgear. I ended up using my BT Home Hub as a stop gap solution and wondered how to proceed. I bought a Conexant Accessrunner USB modem and tried it with the WGT634U. This proved more stable than the USB Speedtouch, but still resulted in a couple of line drops a day at least. AR7 still seemed the way forward. I picked up a D-Link DSL-502T off eBay. This has a USB port, an ethernet port and no wireless. However it's AR7 based and has 4MB of flash and 16MB of RAM; the same as the Netgear. It also has a serial header already soldered on, so it was easy to connect my level shifter up and have a play. I built up a recent OpenWRT and managed to install it successfully and then hook it up to my ADSL. All seemed quite stable and I was feeling pretty happy.

In parallel with this I'd picked up a cheap D-Link G604T off eBay - this has a 4 port switch and wireless and is basically the same hardware as the Netgear. It was listed as faulty, but I was hoping to be able to use it for parts or at the very least for testing. As it turned out it worked perfectly; didn't need to reflash it or anything to get it going. I put the image I had working on the 502T on it and hooked it up. Again, everything seemed stable. I managed to get the wireless detected ok, but the driver doesn't seem to support AP mode that well - there are big warnings in dmesg when you enable it. It's an acx111 chipset and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a lot of upstream activity - there's some work on a version using the in kernel 802.11 stack, but it doesn't currently compile with 2.6.24 AFAICT.

Anyway. I had working ADSL with OpenWRT, albeit without wireless (having the switch was useful though, as the router lives beside the media box but also needs to be connected to the switch upstairs in the study). I'd chased Enta a week ago about IPv6 but still not heard anything, so I gave them another prod. This time I got a speedy response indicated my account was now enabled for IPv6 and providing me with a /64. I added +ipv6 to /etc/ppp/options and restarted PPP and it all just started working. In addition I've configured up radvd on the box so everything on the ethernet autoconfigs.

Flush with the success of all this I thought I'd try my Netgear again and see if it was really dead or if I could get the original firmware back on it. For some reason that worked first time and the router booted fine. So I thought I'd try OpenWRT again, given that I had an image I knew worked fine on another AR7 router - if it didn't work on the Netgear I'd know there was some sort of hardware difference or problem rather than a build issue. And it worked. My DG834G is now running OpenWRT SVN r10685, doing IPv6 and generally everything I need except for wireless. I've updated my DG834G page a little bit, including a link to the OpenWRT config I'm using. Hopefully the wireless will get there; certainly most chipsets seem to be getting much improved upstream support these days and I'm sure it must be possible for the ACX guys to make use of the in kernel stack to reduce their work.