I've put in a few hours tonight working on the Network Everywhere NWR04B, with mixed results. (The NWRO04B is the 802.11b router I picked up for $18 on sale; I'm trying to duplicate this guy's luck getting Linux to work on the thing.
I took the time tonight to get a slightly more permanent version of the RS232 adapter put together. Previously I've been putting stuff together on a breadboard, with wires all over the place; tonight I soldered things together and put wires all over the place. I tried to be careful, and all the connections seemed good, but I still had no luck: I saw absolutely nothing over the serial port at all, and from what I've read it should be pretty damned obvious. I'll have to ask some people at work about this.
One thing I'm still trying to figure out is how to treat all the different ground connections; I'm assuming that they all get connected together, and together with pin 5 on the DB9 connector, but I'm not sure. (If anyone's got any hints, please chip in.) That was about two hours tonight, and if that was it I'd chalk it up to experience and go to bed. But I did manage to find this page, which had a Perl script which extracts GZip archives from files. And guess what? It works on the NWR04B firmware! Woohoo!
It's embarrassing how simple this script is; I've been trying to
figure out some way of doing exactly this, once I'd figured out that
there was an archive in there. I want to understand how this
works, but in the meantime it's exciting (hoo, what a life) to see all
the stuff in there. strings | fmt | less shows tons of stuff going
on: HTML, a reference to /dev/uart0, clitask (some kind of
command-line interface, or just a dirty joke?), an XML UPNP
description of the device...all sorts of information. And that's
enough for now. I've got just enough energy to eat something, then go
to bed.