Wireless linux router

Wireless linux router

[root]

A while ago there was much discussion about wireless routers with
linux kernels, and no source.

Are there any readily available ones that do, and that I can edit the 
image, and that have a couple of meg of RAM/ROM free?

Re: Wireless linux router

[Joel Jaeggli]

define router... do you mean an ap with nat... or do you meant an actaul
router but with wireless interfaces... 

consumer wireless ap's are dreadfully tight on flash and ram. there are
inexpensive embeded pc platforms that are far more appropriate for 
consumer wireless development platforms than an accesspoint you buy for 
$70 at frys... microtik or soekris boxes come to mind almost immediatly 
and there are others. 

We have embeded machines built on such platforms doing various tasks 
running freebsd and modern linux distros that cost order of $250-400ea


On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 root@mauve.demon.co.uk wrote:

> A while ago there was much discussion about wireless routers with
> linux kernels, and no source.
> 
> Are there any readily available ones that do, and that I can edit the 
> image, and that have a couple of meg of RAM/ROM free?
> 
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
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Re: Wireless linux router

[Stephen Kitchener]

On Thursday 17 Jul 2003 20:24 pm, root@mauve.demon.co.uk wrote:

Hi,

I don't know if this is what you were refering to but this looks interesting 
anyway...

http://opensource.instant802.com/home.php

> A while ago there was much discussion about wireless routers with
> linux kernels, and no source.
>
> Are there any readily available ones that do, and that I can edit the
> image, and that have a couple of meg of RAM/ROM free?
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

-- 
                 O  o
            _\_   o
         \\/  o\ .
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            ''
Thu, 17 Jul 2003 21:29:26 +0100
 21:29:26 up 13:12,  2 users,  load average: 2.01, 2.07, 2.03
The first time Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is when they
start making vacuum cleaners.

Re: Wireless linux router

[Jason Lunz]

root@mauve.demon.co.uk said:
> A while ago there was much discussion about wireless routers with
> linux kernels, and no source.
> 
> Are there any readily available ones that do, and that I can edit the 
> image, and that have a couple of meg of RAM/ROM free?

I've been playing with the Dell Truemobile 1184. It has 16M ram + 16M
flash, an ethernet interface for the internet uplink, another ethernet
interface hardwired to a four-port 10/100 switch, and a prism2 wireless
interface. If you open up the box, the machine has a serial console if
you can connect something to the pins.

It runs 2.2.14 arm linux, and you can telnet into it on port 333, though
there isn't much you can do there.  The kernel source is shipped along
with it on a CD, but there's no source for any of the other GPL code on
the machine, like brctl, ifconfig, reaim, and dproxy. I haven't checked
whether the kernel tarball contains code for all the weird hardware
devices, like the machine's LEDs.

Also, something seems fishy with the bridging. The machine's switch
interface is bridged to the prism0 interface with the linux bridging
module, and the bridge device shows up as br0. But "brctl show br0"
doesn't show the bridged devices. Maybe they're hardwired or something.

http://trilug.org/~chrish/dell-1184/

has some details. The firmware image he points to is a zipfile that
contains a gzipped binary blob. There's a kernel, a romfs, and who knows
what else in that blob (the romfs goes from 0xE2CE4 to the end of the
file). You could probably modify the firmware before sending it to the
machine and get your own code on there, but I haven't been brave enough
to do that yet.

I intend to eventually upload my own firmware to it, but I still have a
lot of investigating to do before i'm confident I won't turn it into a
paperweight. Any help would be appreciated. :)

Jason

Re: Wireless linux router

[root]

> 
> root@mauve.demon.co.uk said:
> > A while ago there was much discussion about wireless routers with
> > linux kernels, and no source.
> > 
> > Are there any readily available ones that do, and that I can edit the 
> > image, and that have a couple of meg of RAM/ROM free?
> 
> I've been playing with the Dell Truemobile 1184. It has 16M ram + 16M
> flash, an ethernet interface for the internet uplink, another ethernet
> interface hardwired to a four-port 10/100 switch, and a prism2 wireless
> interface. If you open up the box, the machine has a serial console if
> you can connect something to the pins.
<snip>
> I intend to eventually upload my own firmware to it, but I still have a
> lot of investigating to do before i'm confident I won't turn it into a
> paperweight. Any help would be appreciated. :)

Hmm, I see these are going for ~$100 on ebay.

Thanks.

The only more ideal thing would be something that looks like a 4 port
powered USB2 hub, but you plug a CF disk in, or a mass-storage device, and
it tries to boot from it.

You now can make random things by plugging in USB stuff.
Want a network accessible webcam, plug in a camera or three, a [wireless?]
network, and away you go.

Almost trivial to make and would be very cheap.
The problem is that pesky supply and demand thing :)

Re: Wireless linux router

[Jason Lunz]

root@mauve.demon.co.uk said:
> Hmm, I see these are going for ~$100 on ebay.

They're $80 + shipping brand-new from dell.com. 

Jason

Re: Wireless linux router

[Serguei Miridonov]

Does anybody know about Linux ported to the devices based on Conexant
CX84200-11 network processor (ARM based)? There are routers of the same type
from different manufacturers:
http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/FW_2d604Comments which have this
processor, Ethernet switch and PCMCIA wireless card. They are powered by some
proprietary OS with HTTP and Telnet interface. The latter is similar to Cisco
CLI. They are quite cheap and it would be very exciting to port Linux to
these routers. See http://www.tailyn.com.tw/doc/product/router/fw8-604.pdf
for more info.

I have CX84200-11 docs but, as far as I understand, we also need boot block
structure for flash ROM to load something there, and do it so that in case if
something goes wrong, it would be still possible to load original ROM image
to keep it working...

I tried to contact Tailyn (one of the manufacturers) but they would not
disclose anything...

Unfortunately, I have no experience at all with embedded controllers and
flash programming, so if someone is porting Linux to such a router, please,
drop a message.

Thank you.


root@mauve.demon.co.uk wrote:

> A while ago there was much discussion about wireless routers with
> linux kernels, and no source.
>
> Are there any readily available ones that do, and that I can edit the
> image, and that have a couple of meg of RAM/ROM free?

--
Serguei Miridonov