I WAS going to point out it can be read in the original at http://www.gilesorr.com/blog/archerc7-openwrt.html (with all formatting), but a finger went astray and sent the message on its way. Sorry about that.
On 6 January 2015 at 12:15, Giles Orr <[email protected]> wrote: > In honour of Hugh's "war stories," which I enjoy and think/hope I'm > learning from, here's one of my own about trying to get USB access on > an OpenWRT router ... and the dangers of thinking you know what you're > doing. This is cut and pasted from my blog, so it' > > > I've just purchased a TP-Link wireless access point. Despite owning > the thing, the model of the item remains somewhat unclear: it's > variously known as the "TL-WDR7500," "AC1750," and the "Archer C7." > Fortunately, what was clear is that it has good specs (including > immensely more memory than the WRT54Gs I've been playing with, and two > USB2 ports), it's very well supported by OpenWRT (mine is the one with > three antennas). This is a version 2, which is also good as that has > more memory than version 1.x. And installing OpenWRT was literally as > easy as downloading > barrier_breaker/14.07/ar71xx/generic/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-factory.bin, > logging in to the router's admin interface and then to "Firmware > Upgrade," pointing to the downloaded file, and pressing the "Upgrade" > button. It doesn't get much simpler than that. > > Getting OpenWRT to talk to the two USB ports on the device was > unpleasantly difficult. With the default install, dmesgmade it clear > that the insertion of a USB device was duly noted with a log entry > like this: > > usb 2-1: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci-platform > > but there was no further information - perhaps noting whether or not > it was a drive rather than a mouse? Or what device number it was. I > started to work through the information at > http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/usb.storage . So I installed: > > kmod-usb-storage > kmod-scsi-core > > which you'd think would be in the default squashfs file for this > specific device as they'd already included kmod-usb-core. I kind of > understand why they didn't include the filesystem types (who knows > which you're going to need?) so I installed: > > kmod-fs-msdos > kmod-fs-vfat > > It was possible to do insmod kmod-usb-storage and insmod kmod-fs-vfat > after these installs, but I found behaviour was better after a reboot: > I have to assume there's scripts and autodetection that set these up > better than a naked insmodcommand. Still, it's a bit annoying to have > to reboot a Linux device as if it were Windows ... > > And finally I installed: > > block-mount > > which is apparently required to mount any device. Again, shouldn't > that be in the default image? > > At this point, dmesg was acknowledging that we have genuine USB > storage devices attached: > > usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci-platform > usb-storage 1-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected > scsi0 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0 > scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access USB 3.0 USB Flash Drive 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6 > sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 30883840 512-byte logical blocks: (15.8 GB/14.7 GiB) > sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off > sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00 > sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: disabled, read cache: disabled, doesn't > support DPO or FUA > sda: sda1 > sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk > > But attempting to run mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/ fails with mount: mounting > /dev/sda1 on /mnt/ failed: Invalid argument, although we do now have a > /dev/sda1 device in the /dev/ folder and /mnt/ is a valid folder. > > After hours of tests and googling, I finally stumbled across an > obscure hint from someone who was asking another question but had > "solved the USB problem" ... they had installed the appropriate NLS > ("Native Language Support") packages for their area. Seriously? But > I'm willing to try anything by this point, so I installed: > > kmod-nls-iso8859-1 > kmod-nls-cp437 > > Test again, and ... I can mount USB storage devices! At least ones > with a filesystem that I've installed, so I guess I need to install > NTFS and/or ext3/4 support if I want to use hard drives. > > This solution is both non-obvious and not well documented. I see in > looking back at the OpenWRT documentation that they DO mention the NLS > packages. But I didn't notice at the time and they weren't > dependencies enforced by the package manager, so they got lost. <sigh> > > > > -- > Giles > http://www.gilesorr.com/ > [email protected] -- Giles http://www.gilesorr.com/ [email protected] --- Talk Mailing List [email protected] http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
