I have an Asus wl-500gd with an external USB HDD. I plan to use this box as a low volume mail server, plus load some other assorted software. The combined space needed for all the software I plan to load is too much for the internal flash, so I had planned to load most of it onto the HDD.

I am building my images/packages from svn.

In my ideal scenario, none of the software that is part of the base (flash) image would use /usr at all, and I would mount a HDD partition on /usr. All packages that are subsequently loaded would then go into /usr.

I cannot make this ideal scenario work at the moment because there is stuff in the base image that is in /usr that is not trivially moved out of there. If I mount the HDD partition for software somewhere else (say /usr/local) none of the packages will put their files there, since the pakage makefiles are hardcoded to put it in /usr.

So I wanted to ask the people here how they are using their external storage? Can I build a complete root filesystem on the (USB) HDD and mount that as root - ignoring the built-in flash except for the bootloader and kernel?

I've posted another message to discuss one method I'm thinking about to work with this scenario, titled "Extending include/package.mk to define PKG_PREFIX".