Mikrotik RouterBoard RB411

I have 2 RB411's with standard CPE software installed making them essentially useless to me. (They can't talk to each other, only to an access point.) So I am installing OpenWRT.

In a forum posting somewhere I saw that the procedure is the same as for the RB433 so I am basing my attempt on this: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/rb433

Console access

I needed to use my serial - USB adapter and a null modem and a gender changer.

My serial port console did not work from Macintosh, I installed minicom in an Linux Mint virtual machine and used it there instead. Mint had the Prolific USB driver already installed.

sudo apt-get install minicom
sudo minicom --device /dev/ttyUSB0

Set the serial port for 115200 baud and turn off hardware handshaking. Then power on the RB411. You will be prompted that you have 2 seconds to hit a key to get into the boot menu. It took a couple tries to hit it.

The RB411 told me it has 32MB of RAM and a 300 Mhz processor. Now it's waiting for input.

Boot from network

From the boot menu, select 'o' to boot from another source and 'e' to boot from ethernet. Then 'x' to save new settings and continue boot process.

Build kernel

This build is slow on the Mac, and it's getting warm now; poor Plover is working hard. I should have done the build on my desktop or on Dart. Maybe I will go start it there, it will probably finish before Plover does! Indeed; I deleted the build from Plover.

This is the step that always stopped me in the past, it just did not seem worth the effort. Now I have sufficient need so I am giving it a try. Source is in git now not subversion.

# Build on Dart, it's 10 times faster than the laptop.
cd ~/Projects # NB filesystem must be case sensitive
# Trunk
# did not build for Mikrotik! git clone git://git.openwrt.org/openwrt.git
# Barrier Breaker
git clone git://git.openwrt.org/14.07/openwrt.git
sudo apt-get install build-essentials ncurses-dev zlib1g-dev libssl-dev subversion

Regarding building trunk, see open bug https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/19046

1. Build the Mikrotik NAND version not Generic
2. Under Target Image, select 'ramdisk'.

cd openwrt
make menuconfig
make

I built both the ramdisk image and the tar.gz image in one go, in the RB433 page listed above he does two passes for some reason. It took longer than I anticipated but I spent the afternoon with a friend while the kernel built so I am happy with the outcome.

Driver for the radio card-- I am using Ubiquiti XR9 900 MHz radios, so I have to use menuconfig to build the kernel module for the ath5k card. Or it could be built into the kernel. I could remove the ath9k which I am not using. But I left it in, it's small.

The module has to be transferred to the device and enabled. The file ath5k.ko goes in the lib modules folder and the file /etc/modules.d/ath5k has to be created with 'ath5k' in it so that the module will be loaded at boot.

See openwrt/bin/ar71xx for the output.

Build boot server

The boot server is on the Mint Parallels virtual machine too, it's just easiest. I added a second network interface to the virtual machine so that it could talk directly on the Mac's wired Thunderbolt Ethernet interface instead of only the WiFi connection.

I use dnsmasq as the dhcp and tftp server. Now grab the files from Dart and put them in the tftpd directory.

cd /var/lib/tftpboot
rsync -av -e 'ssh -p 26' [email protected]:/home/bwilson/Projects/openwrt/bin .

This should get the RB411 booting from a ramdisk.

OKAY!! Barrier Breaker 14.07 build worked!!! 2015-Aug-10

Now I can use the running openwrt instance to install the permanent image into NAND flash. This step requires putting the file on a web server. I took the coward's approach and put Apache in my Mint VM. That way I don't have to deal with any funky routing issues for what I hope to be a one time operation.

You might choose to save a copy of your Mikrotik license at this point, so that you can put the RouterOS back onto the board later. I do not care. These boards are old and unwanted in their RouterOS format.

Add packages

Put the RB411 onto a network with Internet access.

Managing the RB411 is no fun without "luci", the web management package. Edit /etc/opkg.conf to uncomment the packages and luci lines and then 'opkg update; opkg install luci'. You could remove ppp kmod-ppp, we will never use them.

I started the web server by cli then used luci to enable it permanently.

/etc/init.d/uhttpd start

Set up

Once I had the correct driver installed (ath5k), things went quickly.

I was trying to set up a point-to-point link, and for my own ease I gave a bridged configuration a try and then ended up using a fully routed configuration.

The idea WAS to put a camera at one end and allow live streaming to a computer at the other end, but I ran out of time... will return to this when I get back from vacation.