After beating my head against the OpenWRT wall for weeks - one thing after another not working as expected - I cravenly gave up and installed my favorite distro (Scientific Linux 5, a RHEL5 clone) on my ALIX board. In one day, I am farther along than I was with OpenWRT. That may be my familiarity with the old stuff rather than flaws in OpenWRT, but I suspect many of the Kamikaze/X86 packages are only lightly tested and I may be pushing a few into unknown territory.
What finally drove me batty with OpenWRT was being unable to get a dhcp lease from Verizon FIOS - after many, many other troubles. The udhcpc program just doesn't do the job compared to good old dhclient. I was slowly learning all the interesting ways that OpenWRT configures itself, but it is far easier to copy all my existing config files off my existing SL5 firewall. Of course, I had to make changes - noatime, serial console, ramdisk /tmp, etc - but they were relatively minor. It is amazing how well an X86 linux system moves between machines, especially if you are not supporting a display. In fact, I installed from the distro DVD onto an X86 desktop (the CF card was in a USB-to-CF adapter), and then modified /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab and /etc/inittab and I was ready to boot on the ALIX. I am using the 8GB Kingston CF cards that Fry's was selling this weekend for $20. Their major downside is that it takes 6 hours to write a complete image for one of these monsters; it is faster just to install and load the difference files. I also learned that it is silly to do the base install then remove unneeded packages - after a lot of work, I got the footprint for SL5 down from 1.1GB to 1.0GB . Next time I want to build one of these, I will just use a smaller card or only the first 2GB of one of these cheap big ones. Just for giggles, I made an extra copy of all the original installed files onto the card, as well as all the files on my previous firewall, onto the card as well. Now I am up to 50% usage. This is huge compared to OpenWRT, but big cards are damned cheap. If only they wrote faster ... Perhaps another option with the big cards is some kind of RAID system. As I understand it, flash wears out at the bit level, and it is only a few of the bits that go flaky early. With a 3X redundancy software RAID system, plus error correction, I imagine a flash memory will last a much longer time. I will probably deploy tomorrow. I still have to copy some of the configuration directories, and get a few obscure packages like denyhosts running. Also, I need to install something like nocat for the AP running on the DMZ port. I will probably compile a new kernel for the ALIX with the AMD Geode crypto engine stuff patched in. I am tempted to do something like squashfs and jffs for the immutability and flash-friendliness, but for now I just want to move on to something else! With all the good brains and experience in PTP, OpenWRT is probably still the distro of choice for deploying multiple PTP nodes - however, it is probably comforting to know that if OpenWRT fails or development is delayed, you can use pretty much the same software load as you deployed on a nucab on one of the ALIX boards. Question: for the very simplest PTP portal, enough to support a PTP splash page and an "I agree" button, what is the portal software of choice these days? Should I even bother to log usage or send it somewhere? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ The Personal Telco Project - http://www.personaltelco.net/ Donate to PTP: http://www.personaltelco.net/donate Archives: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.wireless.portland.general/ Etiquette: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/MailingListEtiquette List information: http://lists.personaltelco.net To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
