This post is another of those “this will help me more than you” ones, but you never know, it may help someone other than me!

Today marked the first time I had plugged the Bifferboard into the network and after finding the first wall socket wasn’t connected and moving to the one next to it, the network led showed life. All was good. Next step was to connect to it.

I knew it had DHCP but didn’t realise that they now set a hostname of ‘biffer’ so I went and looked at the DHCP table of our HomeHub to find the IP address. D’oh! All that was needed was

telnet biffer

Et voila, the response came back

=== IMPORTANT ============================
Use ‘passwd’ to set your login password
this will disable telnet and enable SSH
——————————————

BusyBox v1.17.2 (2011-02-06 12:53:15 GMT) built-in shell (ash)
Enter ‘help’ for a list of built-in commands.


| |.—–.—–.—–.| | | |.—-.| |_
| – || _ | -| || | | || || |
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_____|| |
||||___||| |____|
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| W I R E L E S S F R E E D O M
Bifferboard port (forked from r23226) ————-
—————————————————

Things were looking up!
Hmm, so how much space do I have?

root@OpenWrt:/# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 6.9M 2.8M 4.2M 40% /

Things were looking up!

I’d like to run a small data collection on the box which is in python, so python is a requirement not presently available. Time to figure out opkg.

opkg update
opkg install python-mini

The install went OK and completed after installing zlib (a dependancy). Next, check if all is well

root@OpenWrt:/# python
Segmentation fault

D’oh! That wasn’t really what I wanted to see 🙁

Looking at dmesg didn’t show much of help. I’d already looked at Graham Jones blog posts about the bifferboard, so decided to follow his lead and build a new OpenWRT image. Of course as it’s a custom image I can specify what should be built and so hopefully avoid having to install additional packages. Thankfully the good people in the Bifferboard community have made it easy to do this.

https://sites.google.com/site/bifferboard/Home/openwrt-git

As you can imagine, my laptop has a full set of build tools already installed, so after following the instructions, selecting a few additional packages the build is wandering along. Having done this sort of build before the pace isn’t a surprise, but if you’ve not done one before it can seem glacial. Hopefully it’ll be done later tonight and I can try flashing it onto the box.