More OpenWRT Image Building For The Dockstar

[Der_picknicker] wrote in to let us know about a guide to building OpenWRT images for the dockstar (translated). What they end up with is a nice little network attached storage device that runs SAMBA and subversion under the umbrella of OpenWRT. We looked at flashing and building OpenWRT images for this device back in July. The development branch of OpenWRT hasn’t quite reached a stable release yet, but much has been done in the last few months.

The machine translation is a little rough, but the compilation process is easy enough to follow. If you don’t care to slog through compiling (which apparently takes 1-2 hours) they’ve also made their images available for download. It should be possible to flash via SSH but you might want to add a serial port to the device just to be safe.

11 thoughts on “More OpenWRT Image Building For The Dockstar

  1. You darn Germans and your awesome skills with hacking/modding. But quick question why is this better then the default firmware? Other then its the legendary OpenWRT (my shatty Linksys routers wont let me play with OpenWRT). I meancan I do SSH with this or is it samba only? because honestly I am at the point in my educational career where if it ain’t got SSH I don’t trust it. (hehe I said ain’t)

  2. personally, the main reason I installed debian on mine was to get sftp for personal fileserving. also it’s useful as an always-on IRC box and for tunneling stuff through ssh.

  3. I went the same route as nave.notnilc. I flashed a new uboot that lets me boot any kernel I want from an attached USB drive. Right now mine is running Debian squeeze with linux 2.6.34.
    Right now mine is just acting as a relay for the IR receiver for my MS MCE remote. It has a little IR receiver dongle plugged in that originally came with an IR transmitter as well. I used an 1/8″ mini-plug (headphone cable) to connect from the ‘IR transmitter out’ to the ‘S-Control In’ on my Sony TV. Presto! Works like a charm and now I can change channels from the command line. :)

    -John

  4. Aint got SSH I dont trust it….

    you must really suck at running networks.

    I trust telnet in my private network because I’m not a idiot and let it get taken over. Telnet works great inside trusted networks.

    How do I connect to it from the net then? well if you have this burning need to telnet into your hard drive dock from across the globe there is this secret thing called VPN…

    But it’s really hard to do and requires people who know “puters” to set it up.

    If you dont trust your own network, then you suck at what you do.

  5. There’s lots of activity. People have added USB to DVI adpaters, USB sound, just about anything you can want. Granted, not under DDWRT but under debian. Lots of debian on dockstar action at forum.doozan.com.

    Pretty much anything you’d do with a headless server you can do on the dockstar, it’s just a little on the light side with 128MB.

    The serial hack is a good idea, but it’s not required. Having a linux box or live disc so you can get into a bad USB config is helpful but even that’s not needed as you still have the default OS to boot into.

    This is fairly safe for a novice hacker, especially with it’s low price point.

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