Netgear DG834G firmware problems

I have a nabaztag, a wifi rabbit, but it hasn't been functional for some time now. I've lacked the time to explore why, but over the last couple of weeks I've spent about 10 hours all in all testing various things. The problem seems to be with my Netgear DG834G v3 (UK) router, or at least the interactions between them.

Essentially, the rabbit is configured to connect to the network and then has four orange lights, that go progressively green as it goes through the connection phases. When the wifi is unencrypted all the lights go green, but for any other encryption setup, not a single light turns green, suggesting that the rabbit cannot see the router.

I found that some people are having similar problems with the PS3 and have reported that old firmware resolves the issue six months ago. Unfortunately the firmware to fix it is so old it's off the main websites, but you can find it on the development website for netgear.

That might be intimidating since this site is intended for people trying to play with the code (which I've done myself once or twice), but no coding is required here, you just need to download 4.01.20 firmware (for the UK) and find a tool that can bunzip and tar extract the archive. Of course, in GNU/Linux, this is a snap .

I'm writing this up in case some other pour soul is using Google to look for the same issue, as I did some days ago. It's only when I started to focus on WPA problems with the router that I found these references. I reported some bugs with NTP handling in the DG834GT (emails have the wrong month name in the date header in the second half of the year), and Netgear has never fixed for them yet . I may have to do it myself.