Diet-Router: On Soekris net4501
Diet-Router: On Soekris net4501
Since beginning of march 2004 I have the Diet-Router sucessfully running on the embedded communication computer Soekris net4501 (see http://www.soekris.com/ for details). Here are some hints for useing Diet-Router on this device.
Enable serial console support with 19200 8N1 settings, but do not enable serial console for LiLO. The net4501 emulates a vga controller via its serial device. LiLO is stupid and writes all messages to vga and serial console, while the kernel does not.
The net4501 comes with three on board network controllers. The used cipset is the National Semiconductor DP83815, wich is supportet by the kernel.
The used AMD Elan SC520 microcomputer has a buildin watchdog timer. This watchdog is also supported by the kernel. If you wish to use it, select CONFIG_WATCHDOG and CONFIG_SC520_WDT support from the character devices submenu.
You have to choose i486 as cpu target, otherwise you may run in problems with grsecurity.
The net4501 uses a compact flash card as harddisk. Since version 0.3 the Diet-Router configure script supports disc and floppy devices. I use an usb multi card reader/writer with usb-storge to setup dietrouter. I have one partition on the compct flash /dev/sda1. LiLO is installed on /dev/sda.
I wish to have support for rebooting the system after uploding a new initrd or kernel. Upload shoud be encrypted (e.g. sftp).