I have an extra USR 5461 router, and as many of you know it has only 2MB Flash and 8MB RAM, but includes a USB port.

Would it be possible to strip OpenWrt (or the USR Linux) of all of the routing, printing functionality, web interface (ppp, DHCP, httpd, firewall, anything else) and have only this:
telnet
USB Mass Storage Support
airodump

Thankyou for your time reading this, I do not want to learn how to do so much, if it is not even possible to do what I wish to accomplish, thanks!

(Last edited by schweitzer on 28 Dec 2006, 17:05)

Flash size isn't important, as soon as you can do pivot_root to USB-MSD. The limiting factor will be RAM.
USB-MSD with 8MB is possible, but I'm not sure about airdump.

OK, well I guess I will venture into compiling things in Linux!  Is there any kind of newbie guide for this topic, or is it just try and learn?
Will Ubuntu be fine to compile this?  That is what I have installed on my extra computer, but If a different linux distribution is required, would it work under a virtual PC in windows?

There are howtos, but you'll have to play around a bit until you have all the necessary packages.

I use Debian with the free VMware Server (a very nice piece of software). Ubuntu will be fine, too. You'll need more memory, since it is a desktop distribution.

Ubuntu is installed on its own PC, now in VMWare, that PC has 512MB Ram, is that enough?

Also, im reading this article in the development site, it talks about buildroot-ng http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=31794#p31794

But on the main development site https://dev.openwrt.org/wiki it says something about buildroot-ng being combined into Kamikaze, so does that mean that buildroot-ng is not avaliable for WhiteRussian?  Is it as easy for WhiteRussian and that article says it is for Kamikaze?

Nevermind about the svn question, i used apt-get install subversion and that worked

(Last edited by schweitzer on 28 Dec 2006, 17:42)

With Debian even 256MB would be enough. To little memory will increase your built time.

I've only used the stable branch so far (I feel that what I do is unstable enough to give me a headache ^^)

OK, i have it downloaded, and went into the configuration and removed some stuff, now I am building it, I hope it is small enough!  I probably didn't remove everything I needed to, or even add everything I needed to, but this is just for fun, and that router will not be able to be used until sometime next week (I will get a new one with 4MB Flash and 16MB RAM which will become my router).

What exactly will I need to do what I listed above (USB Mass Storage (fat support maybe?), telnet, airodump)

Check out http://wiki.openwrt.org/USR5461. There are forum threads here on devices with 2MB flash, too ( I don't have one, so I can't help you here).  More RAM is always better, but more flash won't be necessary, as soon as you have MSD support working. 

For USB: follow http://wiki.openwrt.org/UsbStorageHowto . FAT is OK, ext2 is a lot better.

Thanks, you have been a lot of help.  On the 5461 page, the guy talks about nbd's micro (found it here http://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/mirrors/openw … terussian/ )
and he talks about applying a patch, but the link does not work, but I found it here ( https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/t … sent.patch )

How do I get this micros sources and apply this patch?  Also, this patch is from kamikaze, not WhiteRussian.

A bit off topic, but Ubuntu also has a "server" image which doesn't include X or anything extra by default. It isn't any bigger than the base debian installation.

It's possible to run in 8MB ram.  I do it with 2 routers.

root@wr100-1:~# free
              total         used         free       shared      buffers
  Mem:         6244         6000          244            0            0
Swap:            0            0            0
Total:         6244         6000          244

Not much room to spare, though, but I still manage to run a couple of VPNs.  No web interface, though.  Look at the writeup I did for the viewsonic wr100 for hints.

--Yan