Netgear WNDR3700 and OpenWRT

I wanted a machine on which I could easily run OpenWRT. So I'd went to the #openwrt channel on freenode a while back, and just asked for suggestions; people suggested to me that the Netgear WNDR3700 was a good choice, so I ordered that.

I assumed that it would be easy enough to install OpenWRT on this device, but hadn't actually looked into it, planning to wait with that until the device had arrived. Little did I know that the machine actually comes with OpenWRT preinstalled. Now there's an interesting twist.

Now you do need to run some "telnetenable" thingy to be able to get a shell, after which "telnet <device>" gets you a root shell (with no username or password by default). Supposedly you should update that by using "passwd", but they managed to break that in the firmware that comes with the device.

I am missing a few things, though.

root@WNDR3700:/bin# dmesg
/bin/ash: dmesg: not found
root@WNDR3700:~# uname -a
/bin/ash: uname: not found
root@WNDR3700:~# hexdump /bin/config |more
/bin/ash: less: not found

Unh?

root@WNDR3700:~# alias
more='less'
vim='vi'
root@WNDR3700:~# 

Aahh.

And for those who were wondering: no, it does not have any 'vi' installed, either.

Oh well.

The fun thing is, this device has a USB connector, too; so it should be possible to connect a USB storage device, install Debian, and use it as a very potent home server/router/switch/whatever. That'd require me to understand how hostap works, though, which I haven't played with yet. I'm sure I'll figure that bit out -- at some point.