TomatoUSB

Hello Everyone,
I'm trying to use an Asus RT-16N router running Tomato Shibby 1.28 (AIO) to host a USB hard drive in order to act as a NAS for some media files. I reformatted the drive to ext2 because it only had 2-4MB/s transfer rates using fat32. Now it gets about 20MB/s which is normal for the hardware. However, now that the drive is ext2, when the router reboots with the drive still attached, it appears to try (and fail) to boot from the drive and then just hangs. Wireshark and pings show the router responding with ICMP packets that have a TTL of 100 which I believe is how it responds when it's waiting for a TFTP firmware upgrade (or possibly the default state it enters when it can't boot?).

I'm guessing there's a setting somewhere that I can set (fstab?) which will tell it not to boot from the external drive, but I'm not finding anything in google searches or the online documentation.

I also have a 1GB Thumb drive (fat32) attached to the other usb port, and this does not cause any boot problems.

So… if anyone knows how to fix this boot problem, please let me know!! Thanks for the help!!

fstab is located on /tmp/etc/fstab. You need to perform "nvram setfile2nvram /etc/fstab", "nvram commit" and finally reboot router after editing fstab.

No. Get rid of fstab entirely.

The router does not boot from the USB drive. Nor does it even attempt to. It can't. The USB drivers aren't even loaded until the router is already booted up.

Ok… the settings for fstab are whatever the defaults are. It was just a guess that something there might have been causing the problem. The one thing that I can confirm, is that if the drive is plugged in when the router restarts, it does not boot into the normal operating mode. Instead it seems to go into whatever mode it goes into when the firmware isn't working (getting ping replies with TTL 100 instead of the normal TTL 64).

If it's not fstab, any other ideas what it might be doing when it tries to boot with the drive plugged in? Are there any logs that would be written at that time about what the kernel is trying to do? If so, where might I find them? Thanks for the help!

There are reported problem on USB for RT-N16 in linksysinfo.org for having long boot time when enabled for FW108 and are being evaluated at the moment.
my fstab contents as follows:

root@BTRouter2:/tmp/etc# cat fstab
#device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#
LABEL=swap none swap sw 0 0
root@BTRouter2:/tmp/etc#

As you can see, I just use it to declare swap partition. Optware is mounted using "mount -o /mnt/optware/opt /opt" and declared in Script->init with some delay timer.
You can also use this script->init to run application/drivers you intended, like audio driver, camera driver and playing mpd, etc.

Ok thanks everyone, and especially leandroong! I checked and my fstab is empty (in /tmp/etc) so that's not the problem. @leandroong: do you have a link to what they're talking about at linksysinfo.org as far as the usb errors go? I'd like to get in on that discussion and see if I can offer some help, since I have the equipment and would like a solution. It still seems as if the system is trying to boot from that drive (or freaking out because it doesn't know what to do about it's presence), and before I go digging through source code, I'd like to get up to speed on what's already known about the problem.

As you can see, I just use it to declare swap partition. Optware is mounted using "mount -o /mnt/optware/opt /opt" and declared in Script->init with some delay timer.

That's by far not the best way to do it.

Best way is autorun script(s) on the USB drive itself.

@ray123: Are you suggesting I put an autorun script somewhere on the drive so that it informs the router that it's not a boot drive? If so, could you post an example of that, and mention in what directory on the drive it should be located in? I'm not currently using optware, but will be setting up IPSec soon (does that require optware?). Thanks!

No, not quite.
The router can't boot off the USB drive. The kernel USB drivers aren't even loaded until after the system has booted, during the init process.

Do a search on autorun's. There have been several threads discussing them fully.

I can't imagine what your problem might be. First thing I'd do is unplug it, boot up the router, and then watch syslog "tail -f /var/log/message". The plug the drive in and see what messages get logged..

Or — who knows? — maybe somebody came up with a way to modify the manufacturer's CEF boot firmware to trick it into booting off a USB drive. I can't imagine why anybody would do that, it would be pretty stupid. And unnecessary.

My guess is that you are having some sort of hardware problem and have jumped to the conclusion that it's trying to to boot off the drive. Investigate first, conclude second.

BTW, the TFTP boot code will blink the LED while it's looking for a firmware download. If it's not blinking, it is not in the TFTP loader.

@tom, here is the site for Extremely long boot times on RT-N16 with Shibby