An electricity interruption broke my ASUS RT-AC65P, or so I thought.

Although it didn’t seem alive, some traffic mysteriously got through, but with a few exceptions, no connection happened to anywhere.

The router wouldn’t reply to my ping attempts, even though I could get a MAC address for it’s IP, and even starting it in safe mode kept the same behaviour.

It was very late, I was very tired and I couldn’t get it to work, so I checked out the closing times and as I still had time, I went to the store and got me a RT-AX1800U, which is mostly the same but with better wifi.

In just a few quick minutes I had my OpenWRT setup working again. More relaxed, I went to bed.

In the following day, with a fresher mind and less stressed out, I noticed I had missed the instructions on how to do the hard reset, and with that I recovered the router.

Now I had a problem, I had a brand new, slightly better but mostly unnecessary router. Flashed with OpenWRT, so there could be a bit of an issue returning it.

Good news: there are instructions on how to flash the original firmware

Bad news: it doesn’t work!

The problem⌗

One has to setup a network interface in the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, they suggest 192.168.1.10 so I used that.

Then one has to launch the router in recovery mode, and I did that.

Then I launched the ASUS tool under Wine, loaded up the firmware and… nothing. It couldn’t reach the router. The tool looked for address 192.168.1.49, but the router had another address, a more common 192.168.1.1. That didn’t respond to ping, and here I went uh-ho…

The solution⌗

After a bit of mucking around, trying everything and whatnot, I remembered that these recovery modes are very minimal… maybe the tool simply used tftp to load the firmware.

So I did tftp -m binary 192.168.1.1 -c put FW_RT_....trx, it worked and then the rescue light became fixed (as the official instruction say), so now all I needed was to wait a few minutes and it rebooted just fine with the original firwmare.

Victory!

Not only could I now return it, as the impulse purchase it ended up being, but I didn’t even have the need to run some damned Windows proprietary software from ASUS under Wine.