I have a few ERLs and love them. What the article is missing for me is why I would want to put BSD on them, beyond the ‘fun’ factor. The ERL firmware is an almost flawless way to use the hardware as is.
Fair enough! I can definitely say the ERLs are brilliant hardware-wise. Little things don’t even get all that warm under load, and they are so cheap for what they are. I wonder if it would be possible to get CJDNS running on one, even if woefully slowly …
@tedu: Is this like most ARM boards where u-boot and all the configuration is stored on the flash’s fat partition rather than firmware? If so, given the lack of removable media, any idea what the recovery path would be if one were to dd /dev/zero over sd0c? I’m assuming it wouldn’t be completely bricked.
As far as I know, all the u-boot stuff lives in ROM (or NVRAM). The FAT partition houses the kernel, but I think you can netboot it if bricked. Maybe…?
Depends on what you mean by “bricked”. I’ve bricked an ERL two years ago but that was damage from (un)plugging the power cable too often (before I finally able to let OpenBSD reboot the machine).
That had little to do with software-wise bricking and I haven’t been able to brick the replacement unit in a long time with all kinds of uboot abuse…
To answer my own question, a little research indicates that the internal flash is a removable USB drive, and should fit most low-profile USB flash drives for repair or upgrade.
I have a few ERLs and love them. What the article is missing for me is why I would want to put BSD on them, beyond the ‘fun’ factor. The ERL firmware is an almost flawless way to use the hardware as is.
In my case, there is already a “firmware” I like using. I just need to find devices to put it on.
Fair enough! I can definitely say the ERLs are brilliant hardware-wise. Little things don’t even get all that warm under load, and they are so cheap for what they are. I wonder if it would be possible to get CJDNS running on one, even if woefully slowly …
I didn’t like the firewall interface. I was only able to make it work using the wizard. It was a lot easier with pf.
@tedu: Is this like most ARM boards where u-boot and all the configuration is stored on the flash’s fat partition rather than firmware? If so, given the lack of removable media, any idea what the recovery path would be if one were to dd /dev/zero over sd0c? I’m assuming it wouldn’t be completely bricked.
As far as I know, all the u-boot stuff lives in ROM (or NVRAM). The FAT partition houses the kernel, but I think you can netboot it if bricked. Maybe…?
Depends on what you mean by “bricked”. I’ve bricked an ERL two years ago but that was damage from (un)plugging the power cable too often (before I finally able to let OpenBSD reboot the machine). That had little to do with software-wise bricking and I haven’t been able to brick the replacement unit in a long time with all kinds of uboot abuse…
To answer my own question, a little research indicates that the internal flash is a removable USB drive, and should fit most low-profile USB flash drives for repair or upgrade.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=143991263125175&w=2
There’s an MSDOS partition on the USB disk, maybe it’s the one the kernel is loaded from :