WLAN Router WL-122

This page is about my new WL-122 router. The WL-122 is an 108 MB/s WLAN router with a 4 port 10/100 MBit ethernet switch. The Hardware of this router is based on Intersil ISL3893 System On a Chip. The Software is a modified uCLinux running under a proprietary boot loader called MVC.

Current Status

There is no active development anymore. I gave one of my two boxes away. The other one is still installed as a backup for my WLAN router but normally powered off.

The original intention was to use the router for all network services, DNS, WINS, DHCP, NFS. The workload to have these things all runing in an acceptable fashion on this device would be so high that I looked for another solution.

Now I have for all LAN services an embedded PC with an ALIX 2C Board from PC Engines running. It is an AMD Geode based device with less than 5 Watts Power consumption booting and running from a normal CF card. A Debian stable distribution (currently Lenny) was up and stable running after 2 hours of work.

Serial interface

In opposition to this ISL3893 table the Sitecom WL-122 has a serial interface.

NFS

The firmware image 1.0.17.0 originally delivered from Sitecom has the problem, that the startup script /etc/ec.d/rc hangs while trying to start lpd. In one way this is no problem because all necessary services are running at this time. On the other side lpd isn't needed in any way because the router doesn't have a printer port! And the greater point about that is that at the end of the script /etc/ec.d/rc there is a user exit. If a script in the persistent writable memeory at /usr/etc/rc.local is found then this script would be executed.

After finding some old firmware images on the net for ZCom routers to have the possibility to go back to the original software from Sitecom I updated the production router to firmware image 2.0.1.0.

The new image version 2.0.1.0 does start lpd too but does not hang while doing that. So now /usr/etc/rc.local is executed.

WlanRouter Projekt

Using the new toolchain now it is possible to compile a running system image from the original Sitecom sources. After removing the password check from upgraded and changing the flash areas in .config now I can install the original firmware image from Sitecom.

openssl and stunnel

• The newest openssl library compiles for the arm target.
• The stunnel sources compile and link with openssl. The first binaries were crashing on the target. Some tuning of the compile flags solved the problem. Stunnel seems to run without problems.

Developer resources

• There is a Sourceforge project for ISL3893 based routers.
• Samsung has a really good ucLinux page for their open source developments. There are up to date information how to build recent kernels for ucLinux.
• At this page there are really good information about firmware images for another ISL3893 based router. This guy has extracted and reassembled the firmware for his router too and has documented the steps.
• Some useful information can be found here:http://student.kuleuven.be/~s0169612/isl3893.html
• On this off-topic page there is a hint how to link with *elf2flt*.
• Her is a Hint for the elf2flt problem
• Here you can find a log how to set up a *cross compile environment* for another ARM target.
• While doing the first steps there was a problem with compiling the ucLib sources. Here you can see that other people had the same problem too. Compiling first the kernel from scratch solved the problem for me.
• Collection of binaries and configs for ISL3893
• ZCom images seem to run on WL-122. Use the XG-2000 images from this ite.