Four Banger! (extra Bang!)

shinjikun34 2015-06-21 18:26:19 UTC #1

In this thread I will be showing off the Things I do with the Four Banger!! Right now Bang1 is about to become my new router! (because linksys and their dirty dirty lies about the wrt1900ac). First thing though, does anyone remember the password for the ubuntu install?

shinjikun34 2015-06-21 22:43:45 UTC #2

To elaborate more on the idealized goal I shall elaborate more on the idealized goal. Bang1 will be running Openwrt, eventually, and will be acting as my home router. This decision came about after I had to install a Christmas light timer onto the wall wart for my WRT1900AC. Without the daily restart it would take my beautiful 100 mbit connection and give me 9 mbit. DD-WRT isn't yet available despite the advertising of open sourced drivers. I, being an idiot, did not care to check these claims and simply screamed "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!". So F*** linksys and F*** Belkin. It's time to make something.

The beginning process for installing openwrt on some old hardware (sorry Bang1. Someone has to age like milk for the saying to be valid.) is to being able to dd the image to the local disk. For this I've used a linux mint live cd and a flash drive.

Boot up the live cd
wipe the hard drive being used
dd the openwrt x86 image (http://downloads.openwrt.org/barrier_breaker/14.07/x86/generic/)
gparted the partition to be more than the 50mb it begins as
reboot the computer
and........
"waiting for root device /dev/sda2...".
Shit.
Smash face into keyboard.

I've been hanging on this screen for a few minutes now. Swapped the hard drive for an ssd and...still hanging on this. The ssd just helped me get to this screen sooner

The biggest issue I am running into right now is my own lack of knowledge and a lack of documentation. While each individual part in this has buttloads (buttload = 108 gallons = 491 liters) of documentation; using all of it together has minimal documentation. Every guide I've been able to find assumes the installation went successfully and moved into the other googol (10^100) of steps.

Stay tuned for the next Rant of Frustration!

shinjikun34 2015-06-21 23:46:43 UTC #3

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It doesn't have Sata support built-in. Of course!

akraut 2015-06-22 01:09:29 UTC #4

I believe the password is "single user mode"

shinjikun34 2015-06-22 16:21:34 UTC #6

oh...I wonder....nah...

I just kept guessing what it was...eventually I guessed darik's boot and nuke and it let me right in

I am questioning whether I had installed it on there or if it was a leftover from its glory days...

shinjikun34 2015-06-22 17:54:07 UTC #7

Newest update (so far)
I am enjoying a bit of automated elegance courtesy of openwrt's image builder. When browsing through the available packages it becomes very clear how much effort has been put into this distro. SO MANY OPTIONS! It's a bit of an overload since I don't know exactly what I want and I don't know how adding things will impact other things...so hey, lets compile it and see where it goes! I am relatively sure I found the sata driver support and enabled that so if nothing else I will have somewhere to start from.

The pre-compile check "deconfig" failed. The wiki said to define my target but didn't explain what that meant all that well. I decided I could get around it as long as I run make with the #yolo argument. I can always read up on it while I wait for this to compile. I think it's compiling.... make is spitting out a lot of stuff so I guess I will wait for that to be done and then see what happened.

On the good side of things; I can't really brick the computer. If I mess this up I just pop in the live-cd and give it another go.

Updateception: I enabled Sata support but not AHCI. Recompiling. Also, need to set audio cues for compiling. Not only something to let me know it's done but something to let me know if it is done successfully or failing...ly? Thinking final fantasy victory tune for success and pacman death tune for failure.

shinjikun34 2015-07-09 21:25:48 UTC #8

Alright! I'm ready to box this project up and store it under a pile of cat litter. In my lack of experience and knowledge I am unable to get openwrt to boot from a sata drive. I cheated and just bought a cheap 80 gb IDE drive thinking "Fuck yeah! It'll work out of the box". This is rather untrue.

When dd'd to an ide drive the computer doesn't even see grub and fails to boot much sooner than the sata drive did. I have no idea why. In an attempt to hack and slap together a work around, because I am completely out of ideas, I am installing linux mint onto the drive. Then once I verify that can boot I will drop openwrt onto a different partition and see it if wants to dual boot. If that doesn't work, after the massive boss battle with GRUB, then I will melt this fucker down and sell the fraction of an ounce of gold it contains to make it seem work it.

Edit: drive won't boot mint either. CD drive is ide as well so the controller is good. I wonder if the drive is shit....I feel like gparted would have given a clue...

Edit2: booted the drive up on my battlestation. Everything booted just fine. That means the drive and cable are good to go which leaves me with....lupus. Bah, it's never lupus. No problems when booting from CD via ide so the computer is okay with bootind through ide, which would be strange if it wasn't.... I'm out of ideas...burying this project in cat litter

shinjikun34 2015-07-11 22:01:03 UTC #9

okay....project has been removed from the cat litter and been revamped a bit. Before that however I must disclose a very important incident!
Bang 3 caught fire on my desk while running memtest (because who sits around while memtest runs). Nothing serious, just a lot of smoke. It did however bring me to realize I didn't own a fire extinguisher. I now have 4.

so Bang 3's PSU is shot, and Bang 1 gets a full gig of ram.

Bang1 is now running ubuntu server (14.04) which is INFINITELY easier to setup.

pji 2015-07-11 22:23:58 UTC #10

It's not a successful project until something catches fire.