- Please note: I have canceled my EVDO account with Verizon. I am unable to continue working on this project and cannot help others very well without a working EVDO card. Metrix Communications has since posted images (Pyramid Linux) that now work with Stompboxes. If you use the free software they provide, please contribute by purchasing hardware from them. I will leave what I have done in the past below, but I suggest you use a newer image from Metrix.net at this point.
After working with the original 0.9 StompBox image posted at http://www.stompboxnetworks.com, I wanted a web based administration tool to administer my StompBox. As I looked for something to fit my needs, I found Metrix Communications' metrix-pebble. They have updated the original Pebble-Linux and added a number of useful tools. The one I was most interested in was the WiFiAdmin package for web based administration.
I have adapted the 11/10/05 version of Metrix-Pebble to work on a Soekris net5421 with a Audiovox AirPrime PC5220 PCCard and a Senao NL-2511 MP mini-PCI wifi card. Currently there is no GPS or webcam support. The original Metrix-Pebble distribution does not support it and I don't have either of these items anyway.
Here is a 128MB CF image of the distribution, which has been modified to work with the items listed above. The download speed of the PC5220 under linux is much slower than when used under Windows. I have tried patching the kernel with the usbserial patch, but it did not make any improvements with the PC5220. I am still looking for ways to get the download speed comparable to Windows.
- Use at your own risk, I've just made a few modifications to get this to work with the PC5220 on a Stompbox.
- Putting this image on a compact flash card is a little risky. I use the 'dd' command, though it's available in nearly all Unix variants. The 'dd' command simply copies disk images from a file to a device and vice versa. If you specify the wrong device you can quite easily blow away a drive in your system. Use with extreme caution! There are other utilities for writing an image to a CF card using the platform of your choice. Finding and using these tools is left as an excercise for the reader.
- As an example, here is how I do it. On my 12-in-1 memory card reader has its CF slot show up as "/dev/sda". In the directory where I've copied the image file I run the following command:
dd if=stompbox-metrix.051110.img of=/dev/sda bs=8192
The important part here is to be sure to use a blocksize of 8k, thus 'bs=8192'. Change the input file and output file as appropriate for your system.
- Once you boot your Stompbox with the newly imaged CF card it will not yet function. It will configure itself and reboot automatically. The console port is configured for 19200 8-N-1.
- To access the web-based admin tool, connect an ethernet cable to Eth0 and point your web browser to https://192.168.1.1. Login as root, password is root (this password needs to be changed ASAP).
- Currently the wifi settings are setup as an open network without any WEP encryption, and currently there is no way to turn the WEP encryption on via the web-based admin tool. If needed, this will have to be done via the shell using the console login or the SSH login.
- Check your firewall settings to ensure you have your desired firewall rules in place. This will have to be done via the shell and not the web-based admin tool. A good reference for firewalls is Troubleshooting Linux Firewalls by Michael Shinn and Scott Shinn. You can also visit their website at gotroot.com.
For those wanting apt and dpkg, I have created a 256 MB CF image with apt and dpkg included. The /var/lib/dpkg/status file came from the pebble.v41 distribution, so it is not a perfect match to all the packages installed by Metrix, but currently it was my only solution. If you are unaware of what role the status file plays in using dpkg or apt, use Google and search for "rebuild /var/lib/dpkg/status", and you will see the issue I ran into.
Once you get logged in as root type:
remountrw # remount read/write
passwd # set the new password
remountro # remount read only
This link was missing on the images above. To get DNS working as it should do the following:
remountrw
cd /ro/etc/resolv
ln -s ../ppp/resolv.conf ppp
fastreboot
Visit Metrix.net for more information.