If you are a proud owner of an Asus WL-500W wireless router (or maybe another one of the same series like wl-500g, wl-500gp, etc), then you know that this router has a very useful USB port with which you might have attached your external hard disk and have already offloaded all your downloding tasks to it, or maybe using it for various other purposes. Whatever maybe the reason, the main point is that because of this hard disk, now we cannot just turn off the power of the router any more. It has to be shut down gracefully like a PC. One way is to ssh/telnet to it and then give the “halt” command but then you have to switch on a PC specially just to turn off your router. Well not any more. I was looking for a better way to do this and just found out the simplest one. And if you are using Oleg’s custom firmware then you are in luck too.
With the 1.9.2.7-g version of his firmware, oleg added a new feature with which if you press the EZ Setup button at the back of the router for 3 seconds, it executes a script “/usr/local/sbin/ez-setup”, if present. So, all you gotta do is create a new text file named “ez-setup”, and paste the following contents in it:
#!/bin/sh halt
Then save it at /usr/local/sbin in your router and make it executable by running “chmod +x ez-setup”. And you are done. You can now try out whether your router is shutting down gracefully or not by just pressing the EZ Setup button for 3 seconds.
This comes in handy !!
I own the same router over here.
And as i do love this “feature” i discarded it totally. and setup a old workstation as a server. with some harddrives now acting as a NAS.
But.,. thank you for your advise
[...] Originally Posted by harley02 Hi guys, All problems solved and everything seems to be working fine. One last doubt…..what is the procedure to turn off the HDD and router? Should i stop all services running and then switch off the HDD (i have an off button on my HDD case) and then turn off the router or VICE VERSA? I don't want to simply unplug the power to the router. Is there any easy way to make sure the hard drive is safe to unplug? Thanks for your help. -harley Do not turn off the power to the router directly.. I have created a method to safely shutdown the router so that there is no adverse effect on the connected discs. Read about it here Easiest Way to Shutdown Asus WL-500W | Shantanu's Technophilic Musings [...]