Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Recovering TP-LINK router

 My WDR430 router has been bricked for a while.

Initially I tied to reflash it using a SOIC clip but alas, that proved impossible as I had no level shifters for 1.8 V flash. Therefore I soldered an UART interface and tried to flash it via serial. That wasn't as easy as I was never able to pres the U-Boot interupt sequence `tpl` fast enough. 
The solution was to write an expect script and use that - worked perfectly :)
 

<

#!/usr/bin/expect -f

#!/usr/bin/expect -f

# Show all output
log_user 1

# Start cu
spawn cu -l /dev/ttyUSB0 -s 115200

# Increase timeout
set timeout 180

# Wait for autoboot
expect {
    -re "Autobooting.*1 seconds" {
        send "tpl\r"
        sleep 1
    }
    timeout {
        puts "Timeout waiting for autoboot message."
        exit 1
    }
}

# Send tftpboot
send "tftpboot\r"

# Wait for done after tftpboot
expect {
    -re ".*done.*" {
        send "erase\r"
    }
    timeout {
        puts "Timeout waiting for 'done' after tftpboot."
        exit 1
    }
}

# Wait for done after erase
expect {
    -re ".*done.*" {
        send "cp.b\r"
    }
    timeout {
        puts "Timeout waiting for 'done' after erase."
        exit 1
    }
}

# Wait for done after cp.b
expect {
    -re ".*done.*" {
        puts "All steps completed."
        interact
    }
    timeout {
        puts "Timeout waiting for 'done' after cp.b."
        exit 1
    }
}

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

2022 Highlights

2022 was quite interesting. I made some changes in my toolbox.

The most interesting bits were:

1. Vercel and Supabase usage that worked flawlessly. 

2. I have ditched Docker completely and moved to Rancher Desktop and Podman. 

3. Still on Fedora 36 for all my machines. 

4. Moved some personal workloads to Oracle Cloud.

5. Visted Norway

6. Toured Romania

Felt dumb most of the year. And somehow powerless - cannot really get a grab, authority wise on the development of the  project.

Saturday, December 3, 2022

Not much here, huh?

 I wrote most of my rants elsewhere. But this kind of sucks...

 

Thursday, July 29, 2021

Quiet year

 I haven't said much lately on the blog nor on LinkedIn. It was quiet and dull-ish in day to day.
The year started pretty bad, my father-in-law died in January. In July my daughter had her exams for Gymnasium. 

Basically those two moments are what I can remmember from 2021 so far. 

Shards of  events:

1. Always backup SSH keys.

2. At my previous job they are still not able to impement some cloud strategy as I forecasted. People started to flee from there

3. I slacked with all my side projects

4. Lost the will of going out - something that was a pleasure slowly turned into a burden. Also lost most of the social skills.

5. Minor but reccurent health issues. No Corona though

6. Got the COVID-19 shot

7. Hackintoshed my Huawei - works decently well with Intel WiFi (10x itlwm)

8. Pleasant working experience in Fedora 34. 

9. Rust langusge is getting better and better

10. Svelte is pretty nice although it has quirks

11. Oracle seems to focus om Micronaut - probably a second bet that I won. 


Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Plans for 2021

  1. Move from Chrome based browsers to Firefox. 
  2. Build an OpenCore hackintosh
  3. Get rid of windows on my laptop
  4. Finish AWS training
  5. Finish Kubernetes cluster
  6. Walk
  7. Climb up on Retezat
  8. Go to Oravita - Anina
  9. Clean the basement
  10. Finish the Internet radio on RPi


Thursday, December 3, 2020

December

Learning Norwegian. 

Learning Kubernetes

Wondering...

Wandering.

Reading books.


Wednesday, September 30, 2020