Linksys E8450 Notes

OpenWRT Installation Notes

I was on v1.1 of the firmware and decided to upgrade it. If you did this, you won’t be able to dismiss the setup wizard like OpenWRT wants you to do 🤦‍♀️ You must pick a simple admin password to finish the setup! Something like Leboeuf1! and not j!V4BE@4kuK%*H4Z.

Else, when the wizard logs you out, you will see a lovely “LOGIN FAILED” message when you enter the password you entered during setup 🤦‍♀️

Once the wizard is done, upgrade to v1.2 of the firmware. I downloaded FW_E8450_1.2.00.360516_prod_signed.img from this page.

Then follow these instructions. I used these files:

• openwrt-23.05.0-mediatek-mt7622-linksys_e8450-ubi-initramfs-recovery-installer_signed.itb - Once you boot up with this firmware, any changes you make are not permanent. You must use the sysupgrade image below.
• openwrt-23.05.0-mediatek-mt7622-linksys_e8450-ubi-squashfs-sysupgrade.itb

Then follow some post-install instructions (like setting the Wifi country).

Enabling WPS on OpenWRT

NOTE: Doing this fried my router! I wasn’t even able to power it on :( Keeping these notes here anyway. Just using stock Linksys firmware now.

Look at this page and the official wiki doc. In short, SSH into the router and

opkg update
opkg remove wpad-mini
opkg install wpad hostapd-utils

Then edit /etc/config/wireless and find your Wifi SSID. Add this option:

wifi-iface 'Home WiFi'
  ...
  option wps_pushbutton '1'

Restart the network via service network restart. Then you can set up WPS pairing by running

hostapd_cli wps_pbc