Light At The End Of The Tunnel

I’ve always liked Billion ADSL routers, this was my third or fourth over the years. One is still being used by my in-laws. This one I used for a while and then tried to upgrade the firmware. Unfortunately, it failed during the update and this stopped it working properly.

I bought a Belkin and to say I’m disappointed is an understatement. It’s ok as a ADSL modem, but as a router it’s limited. I can’t add a static route for instance.

So I revisited the Billion I always promised I would recover. Fortunately, Billion have done a couple of things well. One is they provide a recovery image, and secondly provide a serial to ethernet adapter. The serial output is on port 4 of the router.

I based my process on the instructions in this thread. I downloaded the recovery image. Moved it to my server, in /tftpboot as 7404.cer.  Told dnsmasq to set the dhcp-boot file to 7404.cer.

Connected up my MacBook Air to the serial port via USB-to-serial. Opened up iTerm and used screen to connect to the USB port. Sent the * to the modem, and it retrieved the recovery image, rebooted and then installed the factory reset image.  Brilliant! I updated the firmware with the latest. All done.