tplink TL-WR1043ND access point is now ready (was Re: svn commit: r227926 - head/sys/mips/conf)

[Stefan Bethke]

Am 24.11.2011 um 08:47 schrieb Adrian Chadd:

> http://code.google.com/p/freebsd-wifi-build/wiki/TpLinkTLWR1043ND
> 
> I haven't yet tried building and testing a sysupgrade image, so please
> don't ask me how to update it via the default firmware webui. So to
> play this game you'll (for now) require a serial console.
> 
> I do however have the unit running as a 2.4ghz 11n hostap, natively
> booting from flash with a 64k flash partition to store configuration
> data on.

Got it up and running, this is very nice. A couple comments and questions:

I managed to write the firmware image from OpenWrt's sys upgrade, so the format seems to be sane.  I *think* the TP-Link web interface should accept this image as well, but I haven't tested that.

People wanting to try this: as this moment, you do need the serial console, since the image will not allow you to log in over the network and become root (AFAICT).  If the cofnig that goes into the image is improved, I'm confident you can run this without console access.

Wifi speed seems to be decent, from an old MacBook I have lying around, I managed about 38 MB/s to and from my server using ssh and dd.

Is there a read-write filesystem for the flash, or are we limited to an archive in the cfg flash partition?

Is the root MFS copied to RAM, or is it read on demand?

I see that you went to some lengths creating your own config framework.  Why did you choose to not use the standard?

I haven't looked at nanobsd in ages, and I did see in the last status report that there is another attempt at creating an OpenWrt-like setup.  I'm currently running about six or seven OpenWrt routers (mostly at the extended family), and I'm interested in eventually replacing OpenWrt with FreeBSD.  Any guesses where a trimmed-down but fully functional (incl. ports) distribution might emerge?

Thanks for all your work, if you ever happen to come over to Hamburg, I'll have a beer waiting :-)


Stefan

-- 
Stefan Bethke <stb at lassitu.de>   Fon +49 151 14070811