Guenther
22-09-2005, 00:52
Asus WL-HDD with WD 80 hard disk running 1.9.2.7-6b, kernel 2.4.20
network: 10Mb WLAN and 10/100Mbps LAN
Fritz Box fon as WLAN access point and dsl router
clients: Intel PCs running Linux kernel 2.6.11 (SuSE9.3)
Terratec Noxon UnPnP streaming client
I am running the WL-HDD in order to provide MP3 streams to the Noxon
and as a NAS for backup and archiving purposes.
Thanks to the information archived in this forum and published by
macsat on on his web site I was able to set up the device and system.
You might want to have a look at my scripts and files for the /tmp/local
branch of the filesystem attached to this message. "tmp-local" is a mirror
of the /tmp/local branch of the filesystem. The rest are additional files
on the hard disk used by the scripts in /tmp/local/sbin.
However, after a quick search here and elsewhere a few questions and
comments remain. Hopefully I don't violate the rules of this forum
by summarizing them all in one contribution.
- setting date and time
With the kernel module and information provided by Hugo
http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=1642
I am able to read the hardware clock. Setting the system time is still a
problem as the proposed format +"%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S" does not work:
[root@asus]$ date -s "09/22/2005 20:21:52"
date: invalid date `09/22/2005 20:21:52'
Neither do various other format strings I tried. Can someone provide
me with a valid example of a command for setting the system time?
Is it now also possible to write to /dev/rtc?
- mounting to /opt and using the ipkg package system
When partitioning the hard disk I was not aware that the ipkg package
system is non-trivial to set up in another directory than /opt. As
/opt is part of the read-only part of the filesystem this becomes a
problem in case only one ext3 partition is available. My script
/tmp/local/sbin/post-mount remounts this partition on /opt and sets
a link to the original mount point: cheap and ugly. Unfortunately the
kernel was compiled without support for the "--bind" option which is
available since kernel 2.4. With this option, a simple
"mount --bind /tmp/harddisk/optdir /opt" would be more elegant and
flexible. Will it be possible to include this in future releases?
- setting up the system for multiple users
This can be very easily done by adding users to /etc/passwd and groups
to /etc/group. This file has to be restored after
a reboot, of course. For some reason adding filenames outside
/tmp/local to /tmp/local/sbin/.files does not work for me. With an hard
drive in the system this does not pose a major problem.
- nfs server
After various and unfruitful attempts to get write access to the disk
via nfs I realized that nfsd does a reverse lookup of client name
and IP by default. As I do not run a name server in my network this
lookup necessarily fails and the nfs server falls back to write-only
mode. An entry in the /etc/hosts file like "192.168.178.13 linux"
for all clients fixes the problem. Again, these files do not survive a reboot.
If the system is set up for multiple users, the potentially insecure
no_root_squash option can be omitted, e.g /etc/exports is simply:
/tmp/harddisk 192.168.178.17/255.255.255.0(rw)
- samba server
With multiple users at hand, also samba can be configured a bit more
secure than in the default settings, e.g.:
[global]
...
guest account = nobody
security = share
encrypt passwords = yes
smb passwd file = /etc/smbpasswd
guest ok = no
encrypt passwords = yes
...
[share1]
username = nameofuser
...
The file /etc/smbpasswd is created by the smbpasswd command:
smbpasswd -a username
where "username" has to be a valid user on the system.
- character coding in samba
Both on the server and client systems utf-8 is the default encoding
for non-ASCII characters. I did not manage to set up the configuration
file in order to deal with this case properly. As far as I understand
samba 2.0.10 is not really well suited for utf-8 coding. An ikpg
package for samba 3 is available for the OpenWRT distribution:
http://openwrt.alphacore.net/samba_3.0.10_mipsel.ipk
I ignore if it might be possible to reconfigure this for 1.9.2.7-6b.
- print server
Works out of the box, very nice. Just some key words on how to set up
a client running SuSE Linux with the YAST system administration tool:
"network printer"
"direct printing over TCP"
"servername" (IP or name, automatic search does not work in my case)
"port 9100"
"name for printer queue"
"local filter"
"printer-name/model" (select from the hardware list)
- ethernet connections
I noticed that my LAN port operates at 10Mbps even in networks where 100Mbps
is the default value. Is this a known problem?
Thanks for comments and answers
Guenther
network: 10Mb WLAN and 10/100Mbps LAN
Fritz Box fon as WLAN access point and dsl router
clients: Intel PCs running Linux kernel 2.6.11 (SuSE9.3)
Terratec Noxon UnPnP streaming client
I am running the WL-HDD in order to provide MP3 streams to the Noxon
and as a NAS for backup and archiving purposes.
Thanks to the information archived in this forum and published by
macsat on on his web site I was able to set up the device and system.
You might want to have a look at my scripts and files for the /tmp/local
branch of the filesystem attached to this message. "tmp-local" is a mirror
of the /tmp/local branch of the filesystem. The rest are additional files
on the hard disk used by the scripts in /tmp/local/sbin.
However, after a quick search here and elsewhere a few questions and
comments remain. Hopefully I don't violate the rules of this forum
by summarizing them all in one contribution.
- setting date and time
With the kernel module and information provided by Hugo
http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=1642
I am able to read the hardware clock. Setting the system time is still a
problem as the proposed format +"%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S" does not work:
[root@asus]$ date -s "09/22/2005 20:21:52"
date: invalid date `09/22/2005 20:21:52'
Neither do various other format strings I tried. Can someone provide
me with a valid example of a command for setting the system time?
Is it now also possible to write to /dev/rtc?
- mounting to /opt and using the ipkg package system
When partitioning the hard disk I was not aware that the ipkg package
system is non-trivial to set up in another directory than /opt. As
/opt is part of the read-only part of the filesystem this becomes a
problem in case only one ext3 partition is available. My script
/tmp/local/sbin/post-mount remounts this partition on /opt and sets
a link to the original mount point: cheap and ugly. Unfortunately the
kernel was compiled without support for the "--bind" option which is
available since kernel 2.4. With this option, a simple
"mount --bind /tmp/harddisk/optdir /opt" would be more elegant and
flexible. Will it be possible to include this in future releases?
- setting up the system for multiple users
This can be very easily done by adding users to /etc/passwd and groups
to /etc/group. This file has to be restored after
a reboot, of course. For some reason adding filenames outside
/tmp/local to /tmp/local/sbin/.files does not work for me. With an hard
drive in the system this does not pose a major problem.
- nfs server
After various and unfruitful attempts to get write access to the disk
via nfs I realized that nfsd does a reverse lookup of client name
and IP by default. As I do not run a name server in my network this
lookup necessarily fails and the nfs server falls back to write-only
mode. An entry in the /etc/hosts file like "192.168.178.13 linux"
for all clients fixes the problem. Again, these files do not survive a reboot.
If the system is set up for multiple users, the potentially insecure
no_root_squash option can be omitted, e.g /etc/exports is simply:
/tmp/harddisk 192.168.178.17/255.255.255.0(rw)
- samba server
With multiple users at hand, also samba can be configured a bit more
secure than in the default settings, e.g.:
[global]
...
guest account = nobody
security = share
encrypt passwords = yes
smb passwd file = /etc/smbpasswd
guest ok = no
encrypt passwords = yes
...
[share1]
username = nameofuser
...
The file /etc/smbpasswd is created by the smbpasswd command:
smbpasswd -a username
where "username" has to be a valid user on the system.
- character coding in samba
Both on the server and client systems utf-8 is the default encoding
for non-ASCII characters. I did not manage to set up the configuration
file in order to deal with this case properly. As far as I understand
samba 2.0.10 is not really well suited for utf-8 coding. An ikpg
package for samba 3 is available for the OpenWRT distribution:
http://openwrt.alphacore.net/samba_3.0.10_mipsel.ipk
I ignore if it might be possible to reconfigure this for 1.9.2.7-6b.
- print server
Works out of the box, very nice. Just some key words on how to set up
a client running SuSE Linux with the YAST system administration tool:
"network printer"
"direct printing over TCP"
"servername" (IP or name, automatic search does not work in my case)
"port 9100"
"name for printer queue"
"local filter"
"printer-name/model" (select from the hardware list)
- ethernet connections
I noticed that my LAN port operates at 10Mbps even in networks where 100Mbps
is the default value. Is this a known problem?
Thanks for comments and answers
Guenther