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GNUBEE Tools

This package contains tools specifically for working with the GnuBee NAS platform - See www.gnubee.org.

Currently the primary focus is building a firmware image to boot into the Linux kernel.

It is assumed that an ext4 root filesystem already exists; this can be on an SD card, USB storage, or SATA device (including md-raid). This filesystem must be named "GNUBEE-ROOT" and findfs must be able to find it.

This package contains config files and scripts to build a kernel and an initramfs, in a format that can be written to flash.

Preparation

To build the firmware, you will need a GnuBee running Debian. Various tools for the initramfs are simply copied from the running system rather than being built separately: lazy, but fast.

On the GnuBee you will need various packages installed. To install them run:

sudo apt-get install make gcc busybox libnl-genl-3-dev

On whichever machine you want to build the kernel (which could be a GnuBee) you will need:

sudo apt-get install git make gcc bc libssl-dev	u-boot-tools

Other packages for the GnuBee that are optional but give more functionality in the initramfs are:

sudo apt-get install mdadm dropbear cryptsetup-bin \
	mtd-utils u-boot-tools

Building

To build a firmware image you can

git clone https://github.com/neilbrown/gnubee-tools.git
git clone https://github.com/neilbrown/linux.git -b gnubee/v4.4
cd linux
../gnubee-tools/scripts/gbmake firmware gbpc1-900-4.4

If you run this on the GnuBee itself (with Debian installed), no other configuration is needed.

If you run it on another machine, you will need ssh access to the GnuBee. This needs to be configured in gnubee-tools/config, which can be copied from config.sample. In particular, CROSS_COMPILE and GNUBEE_SSH_HOST must be set.

The above command will build firmware for a GnuBee running at 900MHz. If yours runs a 880MHZ you can ask for gbpc1-880-4.4. If you build on the GnuBee itself you can leave the model information out and gbmake will guess. If you have a PC2, you still need to specify the gbpc1 as I haven't added config info for the PC2 yet.

I find that the gbmake step takes 104 minutes on a GnuBee, and a little over 4 minutes on my quad-core 16GB RAM desktop. The git clone of Linux takes roughly forever on the GnuBee due to limited memory -- consider doing this elsewhere and coping the result over.

If you want to just run gbmake firmware without the full path, you can ln -s the script to a bin directory. Don't copy it as it won't work like that.

Installing

The image created is placed in gnubee-tools/build/gnubee.bin. If you have this on the GnuBee and have mtd-utils installed, you can flash it with flashcp -v gnubee.bin /dev/mtd3. Alternatively you can copy it to a VFAT filesystem on USB storage, and boot with that storage plugged in.

First Boot

The firmware image is quite large, partly because it contains all modules - that seems the easiest way to distribute them. On first boot you will find /lib/modules is a tmpfs filesystem containing all the modules, and so wasting some of your precious memory. If you run /lib/modules/keep, the modules will be copied into your root filesystem. Subsequent boots will not have /lib/modules mounted.

/lib/modules will also contain a copy of swconfig which is used to manage the internal network switch. The code in the initramfs will already have configured this, but it might be helpful to have the binary to play with.