James' Tech Blog

You might have seen my Seagate Dockstar post that explained getting Gentoo and Debian running on my Seagate Dockstar. Sorry, I just finished it now cause I have some follow-up stuff going right now. Well, Gentoo and Debian is not enough! I wanted OpenWRT as well. They have been working on sheeva support for awhile now. I was a little weary because their sheeva install seemed like it would write to the flash. This made me nervous because I’m using the secondary u-boot from plugapps which lives in mtd3 right where OpenWRT would like to install! So I hadn’t done it yet, just poke around a bit.

Like every good idea (or bad idea), you can find someone who’s tried it on the internet.Installing OpenWrt on Seagate DockStar HOWTO Now we’re getting somewhere. Kinda like Jeff’s Debian install, it’s mostly about stuff that I either already did or don’t want to do. Specifically skip everything until Building cause that’s where the magic is. Yeah, prebuilt images are nice, but I didn’t want to boot from flash. I wanted to boot from USB. I have been working on getting my WRT54g-L to boot off GPIO-SD so I had configured and built OpenWRT before. Follow the steps, but make sure to make root tar and build in ext2 and USB. I tried to use the patches, but it wouldn’t compile with them so I took them out.

With the OpenWRT built. I untarred it onto a USB thumbdrive that was ext2 (and only 128MB). Plugged it in and rebooted. Oh yeah, I got a FTDI usb-serial cable. I made a little header board to adapt a cable coming off the serial port to the 6-pin FTDI. I watched the boot through the serial port. It went perfect, except there were these weird messages about cowardly not committing jffs. Whatever! My flash is intact and OpenWRT is happy from the USB. I built some “usefull” stuff into my image like openssh instead of dropbear. Changed the default IP address, cause otherwise it would clash with my router.

Then pretty much do normal OpenWRT stuff. It would be cool to get a USB-wireless and USB-wired to run a dockstar as a router. Then you could have and 802.11n wireless and gigabit on the LAN! Awesome.