I still had such a TP-Link router in my vaults which once contributed usage metrics to the SamKnows EU project. Since I don’t want to operate it any longer, I thought of changing the router firmware to either the original TL-WR1043ND or a DD-WRT firmware.
This link provides a great walkthrough how to get it done:
https://gist.github.com/Mag81/44097d9a54574a5b2ed8
Unfortunately it turned out that my MacBook doesn’t have telnet available anymore, after the upgrade to MacOS Catalina. Thus I had to install it first and chose to compile telnet from source for the MacOS Catalina:
If I were just to install DD-WRT from the original firmware of the TL-WR1043ND V1.8 I would probably go after this description:
Everything went smoothly, now after updating I can reach the TP-Link router via web interface and first should enter a new root password for security.