James' Tech Blog

So why would anyone choose debian over OpenWRT on their Seagate Dockstar? Why go with OpenWRT? Let me clutter the internet with my opinions:

Why Debian:

You can make an actual “computer”. All you need is either some kind of USB LCD or USB VGA adapter and you have a display pretty easy. Well, LCD would not be that practical, you might as well have OpenWRT then. Some guy got on engadget for doing this. Big deal, I hacked an Xbox powersupply to power my dockstar and 2 harddrives! Come on engadet!!!

You want to use programs that aren’t compiled for OpenWRT. In my case, there is no mythtv package for OpenWRT let alone all it’s dependencies.

You feel more comfortable with a “real” distro. OpenWRT is real, but debian is meant to be played around with so it’s geared toward the “middle-of-the-road” end-user.

You have some special USB gadgets that require kernel modules that OpenWRT doesn’t have.

Why OpenWRT:

It will fit many times over in the NAND! Even with a lot of packages it will only take 8MB. This leaves more USB ports open for drives. Also, you don’t need to worry about the bootloader cause it’ll just boot the NAND.

You’re making a headless server, like how it’s supposed to be. Even using a USB drive, you can make a pretty robust server out of these things. I think I saw someone use it as an asterisk backend. If all you want is file and print sharing debian is total overkill (so is OpenWRT).

With the right wireless adapter you could turn this into a wireless router with a gigE port.

You want a proxy on your network. You could easily set this up using squid. If all you needed was a proxy, again, debian would be overkill.

You know what you’re doing and know that OpenWRT is really flexible, especially if you have the build system setup.

Otherwise, it’s not really going to matter. Debian isn’t built with all the gcc flags that could speed up programs or reduce their memory requirements, I’m not sure if OpenWRT build with a lot either probably just -Os for smaller binaries. The only way you’re going to see a lot of improvements is if you use NAND instead of some slow USB harddrive. Well, add your opinions in the comments!

By now you’re probably wondering what’s going on with my Seagate Dockstars. Well, the answer is awesomeness. Jeff has done a great job and built an updated U-Boot. This should take care of chainloading U-Boot. AKA I could install OpenWRT to MTD3 and pretty easily change what’s booting. He added netconsole support so I (or anyone else) don’t need the serial cable. You can get to U-Boot over the network.

Okay, what’s been going on on my end? I have gone through a couple revisions of how to power my Dockstar. First I made a switch-box that I could control power to the Dockstar and WD Elements. I cut up my AC adapter for my EEE 900A because it is 12V 3Amp. This is perfect for powering both the Dockstar and WD Element USB hard drive. One switch for Dockstar and one for WD Element. This way I could power them on and off independently.

Power switch-box

I have a couple old Xboxes from my days of Xbox hacking. I ended up with a mobo that didn’t have RAM. I was going to use the power-supply to power my beagleboard and a hard drive or 2, but that’s still in the works. I clipped the mobo connector off and soldered it up to a cheap perf-board. I hooked up a switch to the standby voltage and the on pin. This way I have a switch to turn on the power-supply whenever I want. You can see both in the picture below. I also tied in the original case fan. I’m pretty sure I’m going to need it.

Version 1.0 Xbox PSU

You can already see my Dockstar in the case along with the WD Element board. I used a SATA extension cable to hook up the hard drive and the board. I hooked up the power supply to the hard drive. I cut out part of the HDD tray to accommodate passing the SATA and power to the drive. There was not enough room behind the drive for the USB board and also getting power from the PSU means I had to do it this way.

Cutout in hard drive tray

With the HDD settled I added a plug to the 12V rail to power the Dockstar and WD Elements board. The USB board shouldn’t be drawing a lot of power off the 12V now. I’m pretty sure it’s fine off the USB port power, but I kept it connected to 12V. The Dockstar shouldn’t be pulling a lot off the 12V rail either. I’m pretty sure the original AC adapter was either 1.5 amps or 1amp. Yeah I know I switched wire color, but I made it so I know it’s 12V and also I didn’t have any yellow wire.

Power plug for switch-box

You can see my serial cable coming out the top. I had mentioned it in a previous post. Here are some pictures. First some of you might be wondering how to open a Seagate Dockstar. It’s super easy! If you squeeze the sides a little there will be room to jam in a guitar pick. You could use whatever you want, but a guitar pick is probably safest. Then gently pry around the edges till it comes apart.

How to open Seagate Dockstar

Then it looks a little like below. The board is screwed down to the bottom and the top just has the mini-USB cable attached. To connect to the serial pins I used a 3 wire cable that probably came off a mobo (used to hook up to audio headers on the mobo). I removed the mini-USB port from the Dockstar cause at this point I don’t need it and also I wanted to feed my serial cable out neatly.

Serial cable attached to Dockstar

I got a FTDI USB-to-serial cable to interface with the Dockstar. I made a little header board to connect my serial cable and the FTDI cable. It’s not a 1-to-1 hookup, but it’s close. I only had to jump one pin, the TX.

Serial Port to USB header board

Okay, with all that done. It’s time to throw it all in the case and hope for the best. For the second HDD I used a Bytecc USB to eSATA bridge adapter. This is a pretty good shot of all of what’s going on. I have a ethernet cable coming out the back where it would have for a real Xbox. I fed the serial cable and a male/female USB cable out one of the control port openings. The second HDD is a 1TB WD10EACS 7200RPM and I think 64MB cache. It’s a beast of a drive. I’m hoping it’s faster than the one from the Element. That brings me up to 2TB with the possibility to add more outside the case quickly/easily.

Open case of Xbox Dockstar

I think the Xbox PSU is probably maxed out. I know it’s got something insane like 13amps on the 5V, but I think it’s only got a few on the 12V rail. There is a good possibility that I could swap one of the HDD for a DVD-burner though. I have a PATA drive and a crappy USB to SATA/PATA adapter. The SATA just plain doesn’t work, but the PATA works just fine. I don’t remember the brand, but it’s got a JMicron 20337 chip in it that totally sucks!

DVD-RW PATA to USB

What do I have in mind for future hardware mods? Hopefully get a PSU from mini-box.com. They have some good PSUs that would easily fit in the Xbox case and provide enough power for what I’ve got. Maybe even both HDD and the DVD-burner. Who knows?

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.

So I actually bought the WD Element drive to go with my new Seagate Dockstar! I bought 2 from woot.com for $20 a piece. I will be documenting what I did for posterity and hopefully usefullness for someone else.
There are 2 good websites for this:
[1] http://www.plugapps.com
[2] http://ahsoftware.de/dockstar/

I started with the latter. I will be using Gentoo on it (sorry plugboxlinux guys). I have a spare WRT that I hooked the dockstar and my desktop up to so that we were linked, but not on the internet. First follow the instructions on [2] to backup the MTD. I gzipped the images after I dd. There was probably an elegant way to do it all in one command using PIPE, but I didn’t bother doing it. MTD3 compressed really well presumable because it’s full of 0’s. Also, disable hbmgr from starting up on boot.

Next I hooked everything up to the “real” network so I could move on to [1] where we download blparam. I just ran blparam > out to a text file to save the original boot env. Then onward to update the bootloader. Then back to [2]! The only difference is that I will use the u-boot from [1] so root has to be /dev/sda1.

For u-boot I used the u-boot install script from [3]. It’s pretty safe, i.e. it won’t write to your USB. It just flashes the Plugapps u-boot.

[3] PlugApps:Pogoplug Setboot – PlugApps

After that it’s pretty much plug and chug. I set up my desktop as a distcc node using crossdev. It has an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ so it compiles almost anything pretty quick. Setting that up is pretty trivial, but just for reference:
[4] Gentoo DistCC guide
[5] Gentoo Crossdev guide

I had some problems with a couple packages compiling. Specifically xmlrpc-c. I found a sheeva binhost [6]. Yeah it’s “sheeva” but it’s the same processor so it should work just fine. That got me past that, but QT just wouldn’t build. I was trying to get Mythtv installed.

[6]Mark’s blog

After a couple days beating my head against the wall I found that there is a Debian group that compiled Mythtv for ARMv5e [7]. Not only that, but some very nice guy Jeff figured out how to install Debian on the dockstar [8].

[7]Debian Multimedia Packages
[8]Install Debian on your Dockstar or Pogoplug

So, alas, I tarred all my gentoo files on the root. Rebooted into stock firmware and deleted the files from the gentoo root. Then follow Jeff’s guide [8]. Well, mostly, I downloaded his script and realized it was a full-blown install u-boot and everything! I did not need that. I just cut to the chase: download the base.tar.bz2 file, untar, download sheeva kernel/modules, untar those too, cp kernel to uImage, make a new fstab, REBOOT. Then do normal Debian stuff.

I suck at Debian, but I’ll mention what I remember doing. Change timezone to America/Los_Angeles, do apt-get stuff: add debian-multimedia to pull in Mythtv. Getting Mythtv was nearly trivial. Because dockstar is headless no Xorg. No problem I have more than 1 computer that does. The only thing I needed to do was turn on TCP for my Xorg then xhost + to allow everybody to connect to it. Then on dockstar run mythtv-setup. Done!

So future work:

OpenWRT

Fix Gentoo

Make a custom initramfs to boot whatever I want