linuxgeek: [nslu2-linux] Report: Poor man's iolan

Saturday, April 24, 2010

[nslu2-linux] Report: Poor man's iolan

I posted earlier requesting help on setting up my nslu2 as an 'iolan'.
Thanks for all your help and direction. For posterity I post my results.

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Goal: Use both USB ports of NSLUG2 as serial interface (for SheevaPlugs)

I initially installed Unslung-6.10-beta and then SlugOSBE-5.3-beta. I
could not get either of them to support further packet installs (without
consuming one of the USB ports for external storage).

I them downloaded OpenWrt's kamikaze_8.09.2_source.tar.bz2 and generally
followed the instructions at
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/OpenWrt/BuildInstructions [Note: I
didn't need to get IPL_ixp400NpeLibrary-2_4.zip]

After upslugging and connecting I did:
opkg update
opkg install ser2net
opkg install screen
added "/usr/sbin/ser2net" before 'exit 0' in /etc/rc.local
echo "usbserial vendor=0x9e88 product=0x9e8f" >
/etc/modules.d/60-usb-serial
echo "ftdi_sio vendor=0x9e88 product=0x9e8f" >
/etc/modules.d/65-usb-serial-ftdi
[ Note: Vendor and product is SheevaPlug specific]
appended "4200:telnet:0:/dev/ttyUSB1:115200" to /etc/ser2net.conf
appended "4201:telnet:0:/dev/ttyUSB3:115200" to /etc/ser2net.conf
[ Note: Don't know why USB0 and USB2 don't work for me ]

Whenever I connected remotely with telnet or locally (with screen
/dev/ttyUSB1 115200) I got repeating "1`1`1`1`1`1'" filling the screen.
Some combination of the following solved (junk on screen replaced with
SheevaPlug prompt) it for me (ymmv):

Unplugging the USB cables

OR

rmmod ehci_hcd; rmmod uhci_hcd; rmmod ohci_hcd; rmmod ftdi_sio; rmmod
usbserial
depmod -a
modprobe usbserial vendor=0x9e88 product=0x9e8f
modprobe ftdi_sio vendor=0x9e88 product=0x9e8f
modprobe uhci_hcd
modprobe ohci_hcd