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
git clone git://git.openwrt.org/openwrt.git
sudo apt-get install build-essentials ncurses-dev zlib1g-dev libssl-dev subversion

There's a patch to get it to build for the RB433! See https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/19046

cd openwrt
make menuconfig # Under Target Image, select 'ramdisk'.
make

I built both the ramdisk image and the squashfs 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.

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. Once it does that then I can use the running openwrt instance to install the permanent image into NAND flash.