Monthly Archives: July 2013

Installing DD-WRT on Rosewill RNX-N150RT Router

I doubt I’m going to break new ground with this post, but I like to use this blog to capture info I’ll use down the road, so here goes.

I recently purchased a Rosewill RNX-N150RT router, which is known to be compatible with dd-wrt. Today I attempted to flash my router with DD-WRT.

Despite a ton of warnings in the instruction steps, the procedure was pretty simple:

  1. Download the two “.bin” files from here; at the time of this article’s publication in July 2013, the files were “factory-to-ddwrt.bin” and “rosewill-RNX-N150RT-webflash.bin“.
  2. Perform a 30/30/30 reset (continuously hold reset button for 30 seconds of each of: 30 seconds while router is on, pull plug and retain reset hold for 30 seconds, plug in router and retain hold for 30 seconds).  This resets factory defaults on the router to “admin/admin” for user name and password.
  3. Login to router using the web interface at 192.168.1.1.  Using Admin GUI interface, upload firmware.  Utilize the “.bin” from that first file, “factory-to-ddwrt.bin“.  When update is complete, it’ll look kinda like everything worked, but still proceed (may or may not be necessary, but I didn’t risk it).
  4. Perform another 30/30/30 reset.
  5. Navigate to 192.168.1.1 and login (no need to change username/password settings if the option is offered).
  6. Using Admin GUI interface, upload firmware.  Utilize the “.bin” from that second file, “rosewill-RNX-N150RT-webflash.bin“.  NOTE: this step kinda failed subtly when I ran it because I was using Firefox (version 21.0 at the time).  There are notes in the instruction steps indicating the Firefox can act up during this process, but fortunately I had Chrome on my machine too, so I repeated this step under chrome.  Make sure you have a 2nd browser ready before starting this!  The way I knew it was screwy is because every time I tried to save/apply changes to the router settings, I’d get a response in the browser that the page was unavailable.
  7. Perform another 30/30/30 reset.
  8. Login and update username/password as you do so (I think it prompted me to do so).  Configure as you see fit, e.g., change network name, wireless password, etc.
  9. Perform a final  30/30/30 reset.

Why do all this?  Well there are several reasons, but I did it for one reason only: the off-the-shelf Rosewill software was NOT playing nice on my wireless network.  My network devices were dropping packets left and right, in obvious fashion.  The speed when loading pages from my laptop (wireless connected) was horrendous, and I was almost ready to send the router back to the retailer.  Maybe something was misconfigured– although I only changed the network name and password– but it was literally unusable as it was.  The wired connections were fine, but wireless was awful.  After flashing the router with DD-WRT, I saw a significant boost in page loads on my wireless device.  That made me think something about the Rosewill firmware was screwy, but I’m good to go now, and I don’t want to mess with it.

I’m somewhat familiar and comfortable with DD-WRT, and since I’m not a power user of my router, I’ll probably leave it alone at this point.  However, I am curious about putting OpenWRT or Gargoyle on it.  Anyone know a good reason to do so?