[PLUG] fun with routing and wireless

Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net
Thu Aug 31 19:05:31 UTC 2006


>>>>> "Carla" == Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> writes:

Carla> o great pluggers, I am futzing with Pyramid Linux on a Soekris
Carla> board to build a nice Internet router and wireless access
Carla> point. It's a temporary setup because next week I'm blowing it
Carla> away and using Bering instead, which is much nicer. (long
Carla> story, don't ask.) 

Ick.

Carla> But for now I must make it work.

Carla> The wireless bit works perfectly; clients find the WAP and get
Carla> DHCP, ping back and forth, etc. But it ends there. I want the
Carla> wireless clients to get the same goodies as the wired LAN
Carla> clients, Internet and LAN services.

Carla> Pyramid does not have bridge-utils, so as near as I can tell
Carla> there is no way to bridge the wireless NIC to the wired LAN NIC
Carla> without rebuilding the whole dern operaring system (insert much
Carla> cussing.)  So what other options do I have? I spose a couple
Carla> iptables rules will do the job- what about routing?

Pyramid is based on Ubuntu Breezy.  You can get whatever package you
need for pyramid, unpack it on your Ubuntu live-cd box, copy the
necessary files to the pyramid image.  dpkg -L <foo> for the list of
files in the package.  I did this at least once (twice or thrice i
think) for PTP nodes.

I like pyramid.  No reason not to use it I can see.  It's biggest
drawback was that the image was hand-hacked to fit in 64meg, which
means it isn't easy to rebuild on a newer distribution.  It also lost
the dpkg/apt/etc in the process, so you can't install packages easily
on the fly, like you used to be able to with pebble.

Another quirk of pebble/pyramid is that in order to write to your file
system, you need to make the file system writable, e.g. using the
convenience script "remountrw".  When done, reverse to readonly with
"remountro".  Some files that need to be writable are symbolic linked
to a tmpfs filesystem.  Those files, such as hostname, resolv.conf,
etc are located in a /ro tree that gets copied to /rw on startup.  The
symbolic links point at the /rw tree.

If you've got any more pyramid questions, please let me know and i'll
try to help.


-- 
Russell Senior, Secretary
russell at personaltelco.net



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