Shawn's Scraps

They are a long way away in the subways of your mind

Things to avoid when building LEDE.

I’m back to working on my WG3526-similar device, as it’s too cold to work on the cars, and the last HP 4100 was (re)built before lunch. It’s nice to have a functional panel on it.

I’ve found someone else who received a device which was based on the ZBT WE1326, and has a slightly different design than mine internally. Of course, his works with the stock LEDE DTS for the WE1326. Naturally!

I really like the default design of the hnyman WNDR3×00 builds which have dyndns, luci-ssl, et al- so I started working on one of my own now that, indeed, the 5Ghz is stable with a standard WE1326, even if the 2.4Ghz radios are still pretty useless (which is bad for my needs- I’m still primarily 2.4Ghz- one of the perils of not upgrading every couple years for the sake of upgrading).

Anyhow, onto the “Well duh” moments (some I’ve discovered though trial and error, yet others, I was aware of due to others’ trial and error):

  • Don’t install openssh server by default- it has wisely disabled root by default, whereas dropbear will let you login, which is useful for a clean flash (which has no password). dropbear also uses fewer resources. Don’t be wasteful on embedded targets!
  • Don’t forget to not only update your packages, but to install them. luci-ssl isn’t all that useful when your docroot is empty.
  • Always sysupgrade from /tmp – I’ve never not done so, but I can’t imagine it being great to try to do so from a bit-banged MMC.
  • Always be aware of your umask. Anything except umask 022 is going to cause pain!

Since my same-but-not device is a different revision than that of the only other person I know who owns one- I really have to question how we’re going to get this supported in LEDE since we don’t have a real definitive platform for this device, or revision history.

It looks like this device I am trying to get mainline support into LEDE was done in a greymarket way. It has an older kernel, but is built against a version of OpenWRT that is 2 years old (15.05). It looks like they may have used DreamBox Binary Modules. I don’t want to lock myself down, especially to a Dirty COW (if not patched) kernel, but this may be a way to get a semi-recent LEDE working, and stable.