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redboot mit boot_wait und tftp

alx — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:37:32 +0000

My dear friend nbd did some redboot modifications some time ago and now he ported it to ubnt nanostation-2 and Bullet-2.

The Problem: whenever i brick a nanostation or bullet, i have to climb to the roof and press the resetbutton to reflash the device. During cold and windy evenings, it is an experience you do not want to repeat.

An old Linksys WRT-54gl has a nvram variable called boot_wait, if it is enabled, you have 5 seconds to send a firmware image via tftp, so you just powerccle your device and send a new firmware after bricking it. As most devices on the roof are powered over ethernet, you can do this without climbing on the roof.

So nbd patched a Redboot to do the same and i will decribe how to flash the bootloader via the serial console.

First, get your tftpserver up and running, serving the files from redboot-ar231x.tar or the openwrt-mirror. Test your tftpserver. I have my tftpserver running on 192.168.1.34, feel free to change the address and chage it in the example.

Connect your serial console, 9600 baud, i usually use screen as a terminal programm.

Plug your device in and press ctrl-c as soon as the message “== Executing boot script in 1.000 seconds – enter ^C to abort” comes.

now, issue following commands:

ip_address -l 192.168.1.20/24 -h 192.168.1.34

fis init

load -r -b %{FREEMEMLO} ubnt_ns2.rom

fis create RedBoot

After this, use “reset” or powercycle the device and it should expect a new firmwareimage via tftp. Use the openwrt combined image.

learned on the 26c3

alx — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:07:09 +0000

Hi,
26c3 is over and we had quite some experiments going on. Not everything went good, but we learned a lot:

babel did not survive the hack-center.
ahcp did survive.
measurement needs to be improved

That does not sound much, but i think it’s valuable information as we can now concentrate on some things and forget the other.

Openimp did not run good, it had a memory leak we got not fixed during 26c3, so the router kept rebooting after a few minutes.
Babel also hat real trouble, it ate up a lot of cpu and memory, it felt like olsr 3 years ago.
A few harddrives did not survive the heat of colo, so a part of the topology data are maybe lost.
Firmware building and development did work quite good, but could be better, that was mainly my verpeilung, there is room for improvement.

I will continiue the tests in my local mesh neighbourhood without babel and without ipv4 based olsr, so expect more firmware builds soon.

radio

alx — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 08:38:13 +0000

Ufo vom Rundfreifunk hat mich auf dem 25c3 interviewed, das mp3 gibs hier.

wl0?

alx — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 02:43:28 +0000

While doing the last setup for the ipv4 through ipv6 mesh experiment, i set up an asus WL50g deluxe, one of the better router built.

Everything was going fine, except the fact i was too stupid to configure wl0 with the webinterface.

Even on the commandline, i was unable to find it, so in opened the case and saw it:

wl0 died

openwrt full build

alx — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:53:11 +0000

Nbd told me, to build an full openwrt with all packages, ignoring the failing packages, add a IGNORE_ERRORS=m to the make call.

This will let continiue the build, even if a single packed marked with “m” failed to build.