OK, so I flashed the firmware from the first post of this thread. Everything works fine until I try to mount the USB drive (it's a thumb drive, BTW). When I do that, both telnet and the web UI stop responding until I reboot.
If I reboot with the drive attached, the web UI and telnet just gradually get slower until they stop responding all together (takes about 5 minutes).
Login and issue "erase nvram && reboot" and then reconfigure when it comes back up, I will be doing a new release soon if it doesn't work. _________________ Eko Builds
I've extracted the firmware and put the files on the USB drive, but I haven't put in the startup script to mount it automatically. I thought I'd see if I could get USB working manually first, but so far, no joy.
I guess I also need to figure out how to tell the firmware to use a swap partition.
i found my belkin router hitting the wall
while trying to install optware. simply because it ran out of resources.
had to disable EVERYTHING and i still had to get swap going manually
before i could install the busybox needed
for swap in the firstplace..
looked like a catch-22 for a while ;)
you might find it useful to use a tmp dir on your drive, rather than the one in ram..
/opt/bin/ipkg-opt --tmp-dir /opt/tmp install busybox
(disk mounted to /opt)
to use swap, you need the busybox binary
and just issue a "swapon" command
towords your swap partition
i use
/opt/bin/busybox swapon /dev/discs/disc0/part2
i use a CF card for data and swap myself
but i wont recommend it, as it will wear
down your flash using it as swap!
and on that note.
does the swap system write to the same
used bit of the partition over and over
or does it try to "spread the wear"
(like a screensaver burning the CRT)
or can that be set up ? _________________ wrt54g v2.0 DD-WRT v24-sp1
mmc card, Serial port mods
Just a quick update: I have successfully set up my router to boot the "big" firmware from a USB drive. I used build 12774 and followed the instructions in the other thread.
I haven't setting up temp or swap yet, but the router has been running the big fimware from USB for a couple of hours now and doesn't show signs of slowing down like it did before.
Kyndal: I highly doubt there's any intelligent management of flash memory devices in terms of spreading out writes. I know SSD drives have firmware that does it, but I don't think your average thumb drive does.
i wasn't thinking about the hardware doing it.
but wondering if its posible in software.
might be easier to just use a swap files, rather than a partition.
for instance having several swapfiles and a cronscript to change which is used for swap every whatever hours? and keep track of the wear (hours active) in a logfile or something?
just a random thought!
at least that way i could completely wear down and kill the flash.. Evenly.. ;)
/Kyndal _________________ wrt54g v2.0 DD-WRT v24-sp1
mmc card, Serial port mods
i wasn't thinking about the hardware doing it.
but wondering if its posible in software.
might be easier to just use a swap files, rather than a partition.
for instance having several swapfiles and a cronscript to change which is used for swap every whatever hours? and keep track of the wear (hours active) in a logfile or something?
just a random thought!
at least that way i could completely wear down and kill the flash.. Evenly.. ;)
/Kyndal
That's intelligent thinking my friend, I do this already and it works. I have kill two flash drives booting mega as the writes are done to the drive not to memory, you can use jffs2 as your root filesystem but I don't. _________________ Eko Builds
maby a microdrive is the way to go.
you can get 2.5gb segates CFII PATA drives
on ebay for about 8$ buynow with shipping!!
I like that thought. I was planning to get a USB enclosure for an old laptop hard drive I have, but these are intriguing also. Either way, a disk drive would be more durable than flash.
at 8 bucks, and 2.5gb
its big enough, the price, power requirement, noise level and physical size is unbeatable..
i think im getting one
Kyndal
The write speed on that is unbearable I bet.
Actually, on my router at least, the USB 1.1 link is the bottleneck. I'm not sure if the CF mods on other routers use USB or if they have a more direct interface.
I can't remember but I may have the boot set to partition 2 instead of 1, so to boot from USB your root fs needs to be on the second partition instead of the first.
If it doesn't boot to the USB drive this is the case.
I have a new job and three kids so my time is basically nil to work on this particular project, the linked build above is currently on my USR5461 but it's now in the closet so I can't check if this is the build I made for my personal use. _________________ Eko Builds