Wake on lan utility for DG834(G) routers by Alessandro Soggia

- 11/05/2007:  New firmware images added for hardware versions V2 and V3 -

This page will explain you how to make remote Wake on Lan work on your Netgear DG834 or DG834G router.

WOL is very useful in conjunction with the Dynamic DNS feature of this router, but unfortunately, due to security reasons, the DG834 refuses to forward broadcast packets to your internal LAN.  This utility will allow you to switch any of your PC on from the internet,  even if you have only the router switched on. It provides another important feature: the wol is protected by the router password instead of being open to everyone.

The DG834(G) has a MIPS microprocessor running a tiny linux distribution so the utility (written in C) has been cross-compiled and linked to uclibC in order to work on this platform.

There are two ways to make the whole thing work:

• You can download and install my prebuilt firmware image (simplest)
• You can build the firmware by yourself (more difficult)
  

Prebuilt firmware images

All of the following images are compiled from Netgear original sources and includes my WOL software, accessible from the Advanced menu, as visibile in this screenshot

Download the firmware suitable for your hardware version and install it using the Firmware Update function from the router web interface.
Warning! The DG834v3 firmware is absolutely not compatible with the earlier DG834v2 and DG834 (Versions are identified by reading the box or the bottom label).

Build the firmware by yourself

This is the tricky way but will allow you to fully customize your router and to use wathever firmware version you prefer.

What you need:

• A recent Linux distribution  whith Squashfs support enabled into the kernel ( it's very likely that you will have to recompile, sorry )

• The firmware source code, downloadable from Netgear open source code web page
  

• The WRT54g toolchain from Linksys ( only needed if you want to modify the WOL utility)

• The WOL utility software of course

If you have downloaded all this bunch of stuff now you are ready to start. (note you must login as root in order to build the image)

1. Unzip the netgear firmware, enter into the main directory  and read carefully the README file. The following steps are valid for the 3.01.32 version, so if you use another version README is your friend

2. Apply the patches

patch -p0 < patch-apps
patch -p0 < patch-knl

2. Unpack the target image directory

tar jxf target.tar.bz2

3. Extract wol.tgz and move its content to the target directory
tar -xvzf wol.tgz
cd wol
mv * <DG834_source_directory>/target


Note: the archive comes with the wol already compiled, if you want to modify it just read further how this can be accompished

4. Go back to the main directory and create the firmware image. The new firmware will be called "newimage.img".
./build.sh "DG834_V2.10.17.img" target newimage.img

5. Use the normal web-based firmware upgrade procedure to load "newimage.img".
 

Modify the Wake On Lan utility

Maybe you are not happy with this software or you want to improve it, this is what you have to do.

1. Download WRT54g toolchain ( ~ 150 Mb )

2. Extract it and enter into the tools directory. Here you will find the README file.

3. Follow its instructions:

mv bcrm /opt

export PATH=${PATH}:/opt/brcm/hndtools-mipsel-linux/bin

export PATH=${PATH}:/opt/brcm/hndtools-mipsel-uclibc/bin

4. Now download the utility source code

5. Modify it to suit your needs

5. Compile with

mipsel-uclibc-gcc wol.c -o wol.cgi

6. Replace the original wol.cgi in your firmware image target directory

7. Build and install the modified firmware

Useful links

• DG834 hacking site is the main source for all of you netgear enthusiast ( it really helped me in getting things to work)
• www.depicus.com has a WOL sniffer utility that can help you to debug magic packets on your LAN