Soekris boxes are pretty damn cool. I've got a couple of the 4801 boards
and I'm loving them to bits.
I decided that having changed my router to OpenBSD using a 4801 running
on a 320M microdrive, the time had come to do a similar thing for my
wireless needs. Enter a Soekris 4826, courtesy of www.kd85.com. By the
way Wim, if you see this, the unit you sent me seems to have been used
for a demo at fosdem, the hostname is soekris.fosdem.org. You don't need
the image do you?
Anyway, I've got myself a nice little box sitting on my desk:
http://www.soekris.com/net4826.htm
It has 128M RAM, 64M flash soldered on, and uses POE. With the addition
of a ral wifi card in one of the two mini-PCI slots, I think it will
make a great AP.
Now to make it worthy of a little pufferfish sticker.
But how?
www.opensoekris.com provided the means of creating a small, optimised
image suitable for doing exactly what I want, so much thanks to them.
(Unfortunately this unit is new enough that no-one seems to have a
config file for the 4826 yet, so I used NET4801... Hopefully they're
close enough.)
The problem is getting the disk image on the flash. There is no USB
slot, no disk connectors, all I have is an ethernet jack and an OpenBSD
server. I was hoping to PXE bsd.rd and then do ftp, dd, happiness, but
no such luck. I get bsd.rd up fine, drop to a shell, I have an ftp
binary, a dd binary, all is well, but I have nowhere to ftp to. I can't
find mount_mfs, and I the image I want to write is exactly the same size
as the flash I have available. I'm a bit stuck really.
Suggestions anyone? I'm thinking I should be able to do it, but I'm
clearly missing something obvious.
The only other thing I can think of is to make my own base.tgz and
etc.tgz, and point the installer at them, but it shouldn't be that hard.
Should it?
Richard W
