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OpenWRTonMeraki

Hi, Dan Flett here,

I'm creating this page to document a reliable method of installing OpenWRT on the Meraki via Ethernet (no serial cable necessary). It's not a simple procedure yet.

Detailed docs are here:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Meraki/Mini

But I want to create simpler documentation, and explain things a bit more simply.

With the vendor firmware booted, the Meraki will act as a DHCP Client on it's ethernet socket. If you plug the Meraki into your LAN and you have a DHCP Server, the Meraki will pick up an IP address from your server. After a certain amount of time of not getting a DHCP address, the Meraki gives up, allocates itself an address of 10.128.128.128 and starts up it's own DHCP server. You can then access it's web interface on this address, and log into it via SSH.

The SSH username is meraki, the password is the serial number on the bottom of the unit - including dashes.

You can follow the docs on the OpenWRT site to make a backup of the flash partitions via SSH - a good idea if you are monkeying around with it.

QUESTION - can we install new firmware from the Linux command-line using the mtd tool in the meraki firmware?

If not, we press on with the OpenWRT docs method...

There are actually 2 bootloaders - RedBoot and stage2. By default, RedBoot boots first, does some stuff, then boots stage2. Stage2 must boot an LZMA-compressed kernel, and can boot a main (part1) kernel or, failing there, boots a backup (part2) kernel.

Following the docs, I've decided it would be a good idea to use the stage2 loader.

Download the OpenWRT firmware files from here (don't download the ImageBuilder or SDK unless you want to make custom images or packages)
http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/atheros-2.6/
Get these files:
openwrt-atheros-2.6-root.jffs2-64k
openwrt-atheros-2.6-vmlinux.gz 
openwrt-atheros-2.6-vmlinux.lzma


The vmlinux files are the Linux Kernel - the lzma file is the kernel compressed using the LZMA algorithm. The stage2 loader can uncompress using LZMA and run the kernel. Redboot can't do LZMA, so it must use the .gz kernel.
The jffs2 and squashfs files are the root filesystem. We want to use the jffs2-64k image.

We use the RedBoot bootloader to


Version 1 (current) modified Mon, 26 Jul 2021 12:49:29 +0000 by Dan
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