Customising the firmware for the DGND3700v2

[neil_townsend]

@cilynx I've done a little bit of work looking at the busybox setup in the Netgear source code. It turns out there are a number of modded files (see here). From the point of view of your bricking experience, I suspect that the most interesting is that the netgear init/init.c code is modded to have rcS hardcoded at /usr/etc/rcS (where it is); whereas the original busybox has it hardcoded at /etc/init.d/rcS, where it isn't ...

I don't claim that this explains all of the bricking, but it would seem to fit with the state your router got into: absolutely nothing got started ....

[cilynx]

@neil_townsend -- Good find.  That would definitely cause the brick and explain the lack of useful logs.  I've subscribed to ntadmin/DGND3700v2#10 and will let you know if I get a chance to power through getting a newer busybox working after work this evening.  Are you looking to update busybox to get access to a particular applet that showed up in a later version?

[neil_townsend]

@cilynx I'm not chasing any specific applet, I'm just of the opinion that it would be good to move to the most recent version possible as I would assume that it has more security fixes etc. In case it helps, the .config I used when successfully compiling (as per the issue) the most recent busybox is here. It is modded from one of the default options to have every package specified in the Netgear config, and then a few others I thought would be good to have (including base64 as, at the time, it looked like it might be needed for dropbear).

Another one to look out for when working on busybox is the login mod (second odd behaviour described here) which means that telnet (via /usr/sbin/login) using using /etc/htpasswd to authenticate. A default version of busybox login will use /etc/passwd and friends. I suspect that your mod of /etc/passwd will get round this, but thought you might like to be aware of this one!