hardware – jason schaefer . com

I have many open-mesh OM1P units laying around from failed wireless projects. Needless to say I’m not a big fan of open-mesh and have some other projects in mind for this hardware. It was a painful process but well worth it. Now I have nice little OpenWRT units for any hacking pleasure.

I have made a concise synopsis of the openwrt wiki page for flashing proper firmware on the OM1p/Fon/Fonera/Accton/etc. Please visit http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/fon/fonera#openwrt for more detail.

Begin with serial access

You will need a TTL serial to usb or similar like this https://www.adafruit.com/products/284

Consult the openwrt wiki for pinout of om1p

Use minicom or screen to access it.

We need a tftp server (don’t worry its super easy if your using Debian :-).
I tried with http (apache) and it doesn’t work.

apt-get install atftpd

cd /srv/tftp/ wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1/atheros/openwrt-atheros-vmlinux.lzma wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1/atheros/openwrt-atheros-root.squashfs

(don’t install anything newer than 10.03.1, this little thing is old)

stop network manager so we can assign static ip:
/etc/init.d/network-manager stop
assign static ip:
ip address add 192.168.0.2/24 dev eth0

connect to the usb serial:
screen /dev/ttyUSB0 9600

a few seconds into the boot you will see the following:

Board: ap51 
RAM: 0x80000000-0x82000000, [0x8003f640-0x80fe1000] available
FLASH: 0xa8000000 - 0xa87f0000, 128 blocks of 0x00010000 bytes each.
== Executing boot script in 3.000 seconds - enter ^C to abort

You have 3 seconds to press ctrl+c to interrupt the boot process and enter into redboot boot loader

On the om1p, in RedBoot, run the following commands.

Set the ip of redboot and the tftp server:
(Don’t forget to connect them with ethernet cable.)

RedBoot> ip_address -h 192.168.0.2 -l 192.168.0.1/24

IP: 192.168.0.1/255.255.255.0, Gateway: 0.0.0.0
Default server: 192.168.0.2

download linux onto the om1p:
RedBoot> load -r -b %{FREEMEMLO} openwrt-atheros-vmlinux.lzma

Using default protocol (TFTP)
Raw file loaded 0x8003f800-0x8011f7ff, assumed entry at 0x8003f800

initialize the current flash partition, this will erase openmesh firmware, yay!:
RedBoot> fis init

About to initialize [format] FLASH image system - continue (y/n)? y
*** Initialize FLASH Image System
... Erase from 0xa87e0000-0xa87f0000: .
... Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xa87e0000: .

Now flash the kernel image to memory:
RedBoot> fis create -e 0x80041000 -r 0x80041000 vmlinux.bin.l7

... Erase from 0xa8030000-0xa8110000: ..............
... Program from 0x8003f800-0x8011f800 at 0xa8030000: ..............
... Erase from 0xa87e0000-0xa87f0000: .
... Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xa87e0000: .

Now load the rootfs:
RedBoot> load -r -b %{FREEMEMLO} openwrt-atheros-root.squashfs

Using default protocol (TFTP)
Raw file loaded 0x8003f800-0x8021f7ff, assumed entry at 0x8003f800

And then flash the rootfs:
RedBoot> fis create rootfs

... Erase from 0xa8110000-0xa82f0000: ..............................
... Program from 0x8003f800-0x8021f800 at 0xa8110000: ..............................
... Erase from 0xa87e0000-0xa87f0000: .
... Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xa87e0000: .

Reboot the om1p:
RedBoot> reset

You will see OpenWRT booting and creating filesystems and such.

...
jffs2_scan_eraseblock(): End of filesystem marker found at 0x0
jffs2_build_filesystem(): unlocking the mtd device... done.
jffs2_build_filesystem(): erasing all blocks after the end marker... done.
mini_fo: using base directory: /
mini_fo: using storage directory: /overlay
BusyBox v1.15.3 (2011-11-24 02:38:24 CET) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
  _______                     ________        __
 |       |.-----.-----.-----.|  |  |  |.----.|  |_
 |   -   ||  _  |  -__|     ||  |  |  ||   _||   _|
 |_______||   __|_____|__|__||________||__|  |____|
          |__| W I R E L E S S   F R E E D O M
 Backfire (10.03.1, r29592) ------------------------
  * 1/3 shot Kahlua    In a shot glass, layer Kahlua 
  * 1/3 shot Bailey's  on the bottom, then Bailey's, 
  * 1/3 shot Vodka     then Vodka.
 ---------------------------------------------------
root@OpenWrt:/#

Now we need to set a heartbeat for the hardware watchdog otherwise the om1p reboots every 5 minutes.

vi /etc/config/om1pwatchdog

#!/bin/sh
gpioctl dirout 3 ; gpioctl clear 3
sleep 1
gpioctl set 3

Make it executable:
chmod 755 /etc/config/om1pwatchdog

Run every 2 minutes:
crontab -e
add the following and save
*/2 * * * * /etc/config/om1pwatchdog

Start NM again, you will now get an ip from the om1p openwrt dhcp server.
/etc/init.d/network-manager start

connect with firefox at http://192.168.1.1

yay, no more crap open-mesh!

The wonderful world of motherboard BIOS updates, is still old fashioned. Updates are often still built for Microsoft Windows environments. Those of us who don’t have MS Windows, DOS, a floppy drive, an install of Windows 98 to create a bootable floppy, or cheesy Pâté for that matter ….. Here is a way one can flash that BIOS of your mobo using, our favorite free software licensed, operating systems and tools.

DISCLAIMER: Don’t attempt this unless you know what you are doing. I have never had problems doing this, BUT many things can go wrong and you CAN easily “brick” your hardware. Proceed at your own risk!!

We will be using FreeDOS, a wonderfully free and royalty exempt Microsoft DOS compatible operating system. Licensed under the General Public License (GPL).
Note: As usual, my posts require some knowledge of the command line.

======================
UPDATE: Because the 1.4mb and 2.8mb FreeDos disk images are not large enough for most modern BIOS flashing utilities and payloads you will need to build a custom disk image of freeDos.

The easiest way to do this is to write freeDos onto a usb flash drive. Here is an example of how to do this.

download the Lite USB version and unzip
write the FD12LITE.img to a USB stick. I used gnome-disks (right click and open with “Disk Image Writer” or you can use dd.
mount the usb stick and copy the bios update onto it. If your bios update is too large to fit you will need to resize.
run “sudo gparted” resize the fat16 partition. I chose 100mb. Apply
now copy the bios update and boot from the usb. Don’t run the DOS installer, instead run DOS. Now you can execute the bios update. Done!

Another option would be to install FreeDOS using qemu. This is more complicated but I’ll leave the instructions here for reference.

Download FreeDOS Standard CDROM Installer at http://www.freedos.org/download/

sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom FD12CD.iso /dev/sdb -boot d

Go through the DOS installer. You can use it to partition the usb stick. I made a 700MB fat 16 partition and marked it “active”. I said no to the fat32 LBA because I had issues, the first time I tried this, reading files that I had put on the fs while booted into DOS. Fat32 should be ok, try it and let me know your experience. After this it will ask to restart the install. Install to hard disk again and now you partition the c: drive. Then install the full version. Done.
If you need more space you can always run cfdisk, gparted or fdisk to add a large fat32 partition on the usb stick. This would show up as d:\ while booted up in FreeDOS. You can copy your BIOS files to the usb DOS partition and boot into FreeDos to run them. Yay! No more floppy space issues!
======================

And feel free to try the old floppy way. I’ll leave it up here for reference.

wget http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz
gunzip FDOEM.144.gz
mkdir floppy
sudo mount -o loop FDOEM.144 floppy/
ls floppy

you should see these files:
AUTOEXEC.BAT COMMAND.COM CONFIG.SYS KERNEL.SYS README sys.com

Download your BIOS update file from the manufacturer or vendor.
Note: Sometimes, the update will be distributed as a .exe (Windows Executable) file. Most likely it will actually be a compressed zip archive. You can use unzip to extract the .exe file.

Download the update using wget, then unzip the resulting image file “FDOEM.144” into the mounted folder: “floppy/”

wget http://path-to-your-bios-update/BIOS_UPDATE.zip
sudo unzip BIOS_UPDATE.zip -d floppy/

In this case, the following files are extracted from the BIOS_UPDATE.zip file:
inflating: BIOS.WPH
inflating: OEMPHL.EXE
inflating: OPTIONS.BAT
inflating: PHLASH16.EXE
inflating: releasenotes.txt
inflating: 1.BAT

now, move to the previous directory (cd ..), and un-mount the FDOEM.144 image:

cd ..
sudo umount floppy/

generate an el torito bootable iso image:

genisoimage -o flashboot.iso -b FDOEM.144 FDOEM.144

Now burn flashboot.iso to CD using wodim:

wodim flashboot.iso

Now you can boot from that cd and run your flash utility!! Read the BIOS update instructions on how to do this..

Recently, I was installing debian on a new server and grub2 would not install gave me this error:

“This GPT partition label has no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won’t be possible! grub-setup: error: Embedding is not possible, but this is required when the root device is on a RAID array or LVM volume.”

Of course, it being grub2, I jumped to the conclusion that grub2 was the problem. I installed legacy grub and got nowhere.
Doing the usual
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
produces this error:
“file /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly”

No matter what I did, it would not install. So, I went back to the original message and gave grub2 its due process. Turns out this Dell T410 uses GPT (GUID Partition Table) which is an extension of EFI. The “BIOS Boot Partition” is an actual partition on the hard drive. Grub2 embeds the core.img (multiboot boot kernel) into this BIOS boot partition instead of the MBR.
Here are two great resources on this subject:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/index.html and
http://grub.enbug.org/BIOS_Boot_Partition

So, the solution:
I had to re-install Debian with a small partition. Apparently it can be under a few hundred KiB. Space is cheap and I didn’t want to have more problems, so I made mine 5MB and put it at the beginning of the disk. In the Debian partitioner, set the partition under “use as:” to “Reserved BIOS boot area“. Then continue with the rest of your partitions and install. Grub2 installed with no problems this time!

If using an older version of Debian, lenny (v5) or older. The “use as:” does not have an option for Reserved BIOS boot area. So, I booted into expert install mode, when you get to “Load installed components from CD” select parted. This will install parted in the install environment. Before you get to detect disks, do ctrl+alt+f2. On the command line you can manually create a bios boot area.

The following parted commands.

parted -a optimal /dev/sda mkpart 1 1 6

The above command creates the first (1) partition from 1MB of the drive to 6MB. -a optimal sets the block alignment for best performance. If you start the partition at 0 the alignment is wrong and parted will Warn: “The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance. Ignore/Cancel?”

parted /dev/sda set 1 bios_grub on

This sets /dev/sda1 as GPT grub bios partition. This partition will be found and used by grub on install.

Now, ctrl+alt+f1, and continue the install. Select manual partitioning and be sure not to delete the primary partition (gpt, grub bios) when creating your new partitions.

Do this to all drives in a raid!

After you boot into the fresh install, you can manually install to the other disks.

grub-install /dev/sdb

Now its installed on sda and sdb. In case sda fails, it should be able to boot from sdb.

jason schaefer . com

Flashing om1p with stock openwrt

Flashing a BIOS update using only free tools (FreeDOS, etc)

Transition away from MBR to GPT booting