Platform

WISP-Dist on Soekris

WISP-Dist on Soekris

Notes on setting up a wireless access point using [http://www.leaf-project.org/mod.php?mod=userpage&menu=908&page_id=27 WISP-Dist] on a [http://www.soekris.com Soekris] 4521.

Setting Up the Serial Console

  • Edit syslinux.cfg and:
    1. Change references to hda to hda1.
    2. Add console=ttyS0,19200n8 so the kernel will output boot messages to the serial console.
    3. Don’t use the serial parameter in syslinux.cfg, since the Soekris’ serial console emulates a standard PC keyboard/video interface.

When you first boot, you’ll see lots of line noise after init starts. This is because the Soekris uses 19200bps for the console, but the getty that WISP-Dist starts is 9600bps. When you see this, change your terminal settings to 9600bps and login.

When using vi at 9600bps, scroll by page and not by line, because it’s really slow.

Okay, so you’ve got it up and running. Now you probably want to change the serial console speed so it’s not such a PITA. On your development host, where you’ve unzipped WISP-Dist, create a directory which we’ll call root here. Change into this directory and un-tgz the root.lrp file here. Edit etc/inittab and change the T1 line from 9600 to 19200. Re-tgz the files in the root/ directory and rename the tarball root.lrp (taking care to backup your original root.lrp). Re-generate the root.md5 with

find . -type f | sed -e 's#^\./##' |xargs md5sum > ../root.md5

and then copy these to your packages directory on your flash.

Cleaning Up Boot

  1. Un-gzip initrd.lrp (zcat initrd.lrp > initrd.lrp.ungz); this is a compressed Minix file system.

  2. Mount in a temporary location:

    mount -o loop initrd.lrp.ungz /mnt/tmp2
  3. Edit boot/etc/modules and remove: mtdcore, doc2000, docecc, docprobe, nftl. We’re not using DiskOnChip here, and it just clutters boot and probably makes it slower.
  4. Unmount /mnt/tmp2.
  5. Re-compresss: gzip -c9 initrd.lrp.ungz > initrd.lrp.

Disable inetd

  1. In the root.lrp package, edit etc/init.d/inetd and comment out RCDLINKS

Enable dhcpd

  1. In the root.lrp package, edit etc/init.d/dhcpd and uncomment RCDLINKS