Installing OpenWRT on the Alix board

I would like my alix based machine to be something more than only a router/firewall, so I’ve decided to install and try OpenWRT: so easy …

The download section of the OpenWRT website has a large choice of images for different devices:
the alix boards are very well supported in the last 8.09.1 kamikaze x86 images.

I’ve downloaded the following ext2 image
http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/8.09.1/x86/openwrt-x86-ext2.image
and I’ve extracted it to the CF card using dd.

My CF card gets recognized as device /dev/sdd, so I’ve issued the following command:

root@wombat:tmp# dd if=openwrt-x86-ext2.image of=/dev/sdd

107439+0 records in
107439+0 records out
55008768 bytes (55 MB) copied, 20.5467 s, 2.7 MB/s

The image gets extracted in a few seconds and two partitions are created on the CF card:

root@wombat:tmp# parted /dev/sdd print

Model: Generic STORAGE DEVICE (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdd: 1039MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 4645kB 4613kB primary ext2 boot
2 4677kB 55.2MB 50.5MB primary ext2

The root partition is quite small, only 50MB, so I’ve used gparted to resize it and use all the free space on my 1GB CF:

disk layout before resizing

resizing

new disk layout

At this point everything is ready to run the system:
insert the CF, connect the alix’ serial port using minicom and power the board …

… OpenWRT boots … it’s amazing how fast!

There are a few things worth doing now:

• from the console, running passwd to set the root password:
  this will also disable telnet, making remote access  only possible through ssh.

• eventually edit /etc/config/network to change the default IP address of the eth0 interfaceThis change will require restarting the network issuing

  root@OpenWrt:/# /etc/init.d/network restart

At this point the system is ready to be configured using the shell or the web interface.