Re: WRT54G Support?
On Tuesday 14 February 2006 08:16, Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com> wrote
about 'Re: WRT54G Support?':
> * Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <bss03@volumehost.net> [2006-02-14 06:32]:
> > I finally drove in and installed OpenWRT on my WRT54G 1.1, but now
> > that I've played with it, I was hoping to install a more complete
> > distro, like debian.
>
> I thought this device didn't have a USB port. How/where do you
> install Debian?
Mine doesn't, although I hear it's possible to open up the case and solder
one to the board. That's not my goal however.
> FWIW, I'm currently running Debian on a Netgear WGT634U, a
> mipsel-based router with wifi, 5 port switch, 32 MB RAM, 8 MB flash
> and a USB port so you can connect a hard drive. I installed it
> manually and compiled my own kernel, but I am working on getting
> debian-installer to work on this, and similar devices such as the
> WL-500g*, running.
Nice, so the kernel and package support is there, good. That's the main
thing I was concerned with. My specs are almost identical, I have half
the ram you do, probably a slower processor (~85MHz), and, as mentioned
above, no USB port.
I'm not so concerned with the storage issue. My "grand design" includes
having the image on flash pivot_root onto nfs or nbd/iscsi/ataoe. Once
you get off the flash it's size stops being an issue.
I know debian-installer isn't going to be able to do this automatically,
but I'm interested in a two-stage boot process (similar to using and
initrd or initramfs for LVM /):
1) RO Squashfs image for inital boot (the same way the OpenWRT setup goes).
1a) Configure the vlans (settings from nvram)
1b) Bring up the lan (settings from nvram), but leave all other interfaces
down.
1c) Start a dhcp server (may need to mount a small ramdisk to save leases)
1d) Start any other services (like portmap) needed for (1e).
1e) Enter a loop that waits for my desktop to expose nfs,nbd,iscsi or
ataoe.
1f) Mount the /real/ root
1g) Copy leases over, and shutdown dhcp server and any other services that
don't have to stay up (e.g., I think I can shut down portmap at this
point).
1h) pivot_root into new root and start /sbin/init for the full debian
system and unmount all the stage 1 filesystems.
2) Debian-mipsel system
2a) iptables,ip6tables,6to4tunneling,qos,etc.
2b) Bring up all network interfaces.
2b) opensshd,openntpd,etc.
2c) apt,etc.
Since I won't be reusing binaries between stage 1 and stage 2 I was going
to use uclibc or even klibc for stage1 but run a full glibc in stage 2.
--
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
bss03@volumehost.net
ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy
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