OpenWRT for COMFAST Routers

OpenWrt support for COMFAST routers is scarce, but you could use LEDE instead.

If you came here looking for OpenWrt firmware for COMFAST routers, you probably haven’t read this OpenWrt forum post. COMFAST (like many Chinese companies), showed little regard for the GPL, and this pissed off a lot of OpenWrt devs.

OpenWrt support for COMFAST

Although it isn’t clear if this is the sole reason why OpenWrt support for COMFAST routers is scarce, but surely support for COMFAST routers is scarce and there isn’t much being done to add support for these devices.

The other problem with COMFAST is that on their default (vendor supplied) firmware, ssh password has been changed. And, their web UI update doesn’t accept OpenWrt firmwares. It only accepts COMFAST firmwares.

The LEDE project

The good news is that the LEDE project (also based on OpenWrt) supports quite a few COMFAST models. And a lot of new COMFAST models are essentially clones of earlier ones. (The CF-E325n for example is a CF-E316N v2 clone.)

You can find prebuilt LEDE firmwares here.

Flashing the firmware

• I suggest you get yourself a USB TTL serial cable. You’d have to open up the COMFAST router and connect the cable to the Tx, Rx and ground pins, to be able to see the boot logs.
• The bootloader, by default, checks for a firmware_auto.bin tftp server on a predefined IP. You can view this in the boot logs.
• Then assign your dev machine this static predefined IP and setup a tftp server on your dev machine.
• Rename the firmware to firmware_auto.bin, and serve it on the tftp server.
• Now reset the router.

If all goes well, the device should connect to tftp server, download and flash the firmware. It may take about a minute for the device to show up on the network.