05 Oct 08 APNIC Box – Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 3 – Installing Debian, Prebuilt Disk Image

Follow on from 01 Oct 08 APNIC Box – Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 2

The device runs a 2.4.30 kernel on a debian woody (mipsel) environment. If anyone can contribute anything for 2.6.x and debian etch, that would be great.

In this part, I’m going to provide a download link to a prebuilt image which you can write directly onto your own CF card with dd or similar tool. I’m also going to provide a step by step to installing debian yourself without my prebuilt disk image.

Prebuilt image is here:

The prebuilt image also contains a number of scripts and tools that I’ll comment on and come to in later parts.

Now installation instructions:
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Tags: 532a, apnicbox, apt-get, atftpd, CF, compile, cross compile, Custom Kernel, dd, debian, dhcpd, dhcpd.conf installer, forward, initrd, initrd.gz, iptables, ip_forward, kernel, Linux, linuxrc, masquerade, mikrotik, mipsel, mkfs, mknod, mount, partition, prebuild image, routerboard, routerboard 532a, scripts, sed, tftpd, vmlinux, wget

26 May 08 Linux device names & mounting

Recently I came across an annoying issue. I have three identical Seagate USB mass storage devices, plugged in to a debian etch 4.0 stable (2.6.18) machine. I could add those devices and mount points to /etc/fstab, but upon reboot, the /dev/sdX device names would change and therefore the drives would get mounted in the wrong place and bad things would happen. To summarize, “drive1″ would appear as /dev/sdb on one boot, but on another boot, “drive1″ would appear as /dev/sdc with “drive2″ appearing as /dev/sdb.

There are two options here, use the drive serial numbers and some UDEV trickery to ensure that a particular drive gets the same device name each time, but I wasn’t so sure about that.
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Tags: automounter, debian, drive, fstab, Linux, mass storage device, mount, partition, usb