Flashing OpenWRT onto a D-link DIR-615 – The Sequel!

The funny part about this blog is that I spent an entire day searching for how to do this and then I ended up landing on a blog post with the answer… written by ME. in this 2015 blog post Lol or something?

This tutorial assumes you are using Ubuntu and know how to access your terminal and do some basic commands. If not, do a quick study on that before you begin. If you aren’t using Ubuntu on your computer I’m not sure what I can do to help other than encourage you to switch immediately.

This tutorial also assumes that your computer/laptop is plugged directly into the DIR-615 router by ethernet cable and not by wifi. It could probably be done with wifi, but I don’t know and I know it adds an extra layer of complexity I don’t like. So find a cable and plug in to do all this.

1. Download the appropriate image from OpenWRT to your computer.

I got mine by refining a search here.

2. Extract the file into it’s raw ‘.bin’ format.

Mine looks exactly as follows at the time of this writing when it’s sitting in my directory but as versions change and improve this could slightly change be aware:

lede-17.01.4-ar71xx-generic-dir-615-c1-squashfs-factory.bin

3. Using your terminal cd (change directory) to the location where the file is you just extracted in step 2.

4. Make sure your computer is set to a static IP address.

If you don’t know how to do this, search it online as I don’t have a quick link to it right now. “How to set static IP address in Ubuntu’ should find something. Make sure that your static IP address you are setting does not conflict with another device on the router, nor with the router itself at 192.168.0.1.

192.168.0.2 static

NOTE: After this router is flashed you will need to get rid of this static IP address since it won’t match your new router!

5. Pre-enter the following command into your terminal so you are ready to press enter

curl -0vF files=@lede-17.01.4-ar71xx-generic-dir-615-c1-squashfs-factory.bin http://192.168.0.1/cgi/index

Again, the part after the @ symbol in the command above might change depending on the .bin file you are flashing on. This tutorial will likely get old at some point so you may need to swap out a different file name into the command above but the rest should work long term.

6. Power off the router by unplugging the black power cable

Warning. You are about to forever wipe your router’s ‘operating system’ so if you have anything in there you care about this would be the time to get those out!

7. Put pen in the reset button of router and hold it there

8. While still holding reset button, plug in the power cable.

Keep holding the reset button! Don’t let go. The light will be a solid colour (orange, I recall?) but you are waiting for the first flash before executing the next step.

9. As soon as the solid light starts to flash hit the enter key in your terminal and run the curl command you pre-entered in step 5 above

After you hit this command at the perfect moment, things should start to work. When they do, you’ll see some funky html stuff come on the screen that looks like this:
* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
* Trying 192.168.0.1…
* Connected to 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) port 80 (#0)
> POST /cgi/index HTTP/1.0
> User-Agent: curl/7.35.0
> Host: 192.168.0.1
> Accept: /
> Content-Length: 3932431
> Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=————————464dbec1925a46d8
>
* HTTP 1.0, assume close after body
< HTTP/1.0 200 OK
< Server: uIP/0.9 (http://dunkels.com/adam/uip/)
< Content-type: text/html
<
backup loader Device is Upgrading the Firmware

• Don’t turn the device off before the Upgrade jobs done !

More notes for this step
The screen will stay with this html/> script on there and at this point you can keep your eyes on the router as nothing will happen on the screen.
You should see lights flashing and reboots. Wait, wait, wait. Failure seems real but it’s not yet…. For me I was stuck on a green light for a really long time and no updates in terminal.

If after 5 minutes (or so) things appear to be ‘stuck’ at that point you could try unplugging the power cable and plugging it back in again to test.

To test to see if it worked, go to the new access IP address which should be 192.168.1.1. If you are prompted for user/password you succeeded.

A few troubleshooting notes

Something didn’t work? Read these next few points for some inspiration:

• Did you really make a static IP address in step 4? You might think you did but maybe it didn’t work. Check with ifconfig command and see what IP address your computer/laptop has. If it’s not static, things won’t work right.
• Were you too fast or too slow with the timing of the curl command in Step 5? Timing is a bit finicky here so you may have to try a few times to nail it.
• If things are really goofy you ‘may’ need to install the original Dlink .bin file and start from there. I doubt it but there are records of this online so I thought I would mention it. You could get this on there by finding this .bin file online and using your new curl skills from above to flash the original .bin on there first.

Bin file name for DIR-615 = dir615_revC_firmware_311NA.bin

command to flash it on:
curl -0vF files=@dir615_revC_firmware_311NA.bin http://192.168.0.1/cgi/index

Follow up notes

• Reminder! Turn your computer/laptop back to DHCP mode from static IP otherwise you might not be able to connect at all to your new router! I made this mistake way too many times and easy to forget.
• After getting things up and running and if you need ddns, reboot device via ssh. when it comes back, then you could try this tutorial I wrote for the No-ip service. Here is a link to that tutorial.