how to reload optware usb stick on asus oplay
Sometime ago one of my dogs decided to eat my asus o'play remote control. Without the remote the unit is pretty much useless. At the same time, I was looking for a way to have a always on machine serving 2 HD on my home network and for that I was using my linux machine but it was bugging me that I had so much power for so little needs.
So I thought that maybe I could turn the asus media player into a samba server. I'd heard that the asus was a linux machine and it's true. Not only that but root access is as easy as telnet to the machine and login with username root and no password.
So I went through the processes described here to install moservices on the machine and this way install samba. It works well and my machines on the network can all see and access the two harddisks.
The other requirement I had was to have one of the HD as the main and the other as the backup. Put everything onto HD1 and then, every day at night to a backup with rsync. Thing is rsync is not installed on the asus o'play and it does not come with moservices, so the next option was to install optware (package management for embebbed linux). Trouble is the asus o'play doesn't have enough space to install it. So I followed these instructions to get it running again. For aht's coming to work, do not follow the steps of cleaning up the USB tmp files. It worked well but there's a few things to note:
1. There's a program that loads the USD HD on the o'play. That program comes with the o'play and you either delete and replace it by your own or you are a slave of how the o'play decides to call your USB HD. For me this is not a big problem because it is enough for me to plug them in at the correct sequence for them to be available in the right sequence on samba. I.e. it doesn't matter how they get mounted on the o'play because the first disk is always going to be called disk1 on the samba share and the second is going to be called disk2 on the sahre, no matter is they are automatically mounted as /mnt/usbmounts/sdb1 or /mnt/usbmounts/sdc1 or whatever.
2. I do have a problem with reloading my optware USB stick though, because that one I need to be loaded to the same mount point other wise it will not work. So, instead of making it a persistent mount point, I'm lazy and follow this steps after each reboot (that only really happens every 3 months anyway):
a) plug the USB stick in and find out where it mounted with df:
BusyBox v1.1.3 (2010.09.07-08:50+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
~ # df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 76288 75212 1076 99% /
/dev/mtdblock/2 61440 8608 52832 14% /usr/local/etc
/dev/rd/0 40 40 0 100% /mnt/rd
/dev/scsi/host5/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 976521568 924004192 52517376 95% /tmp/usbmounts/sdb1
/dev/scsi/host6/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 975592816 921977600 53615216 95% /tmp/usbmounts/sdf1
/dev/scsi/host8/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 7861696 180928 7281412 2% /tmp/usbmounts/sdg1
You can see my two harddisks and the USB stick above. The HD are the image of each other so they are both used up by 95%. The optware USB stick is the last one (around 8GB with 1.8GB used up).
b) mount / as rw and a few more:
~ # mount / -o rw, remount
~ # mkdir /opt
~ # ln - s /tmp/usbmounts/sdg1 /opt
c) cd to /opt/tmp and run
/opt/tmp/ipkg-cl install uclibc-opt_0.9.28-13_mipsel.ipk/opt/tmp/ipkg-cl install ipkg-opt_0.99.163-10_mipsel.ipk
/opt/bin/ipkg updatee) Find rsync (you may have to install it with optware)
ls -la /opt/binf) To make rsync backup your files from the main HD to the backup HD issue the command I spoke about on a previous post.
rsync -avh --delete /path/to/main/drive /path/to/backup/drive
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