Florent Thoumie

Since my toy-router (PcEngines WRAP) has been running NanoBSD 5.3-STABLE for more than one year and I finally got a pigtail to use with my miniPCI Atheros-based Wireless (Wistron CM9) card, I finally decided to upgrade it.

It has been difficult to find a configuration file to begin with: since phk rewrote the build script from a Makefile to a shell script, most examples are still old-world configuration files. Anyway, I found one at bmah’s place which was almost exactly what I wanted.

One nice thing with NanoBSD is that the Compact Flash is divided into 3 parts, one for /etc/ modified configuration files and two for the system itself. If you type ‘mount’ on NanoBSD, you’ll notice that /etc is a md, which means it’s memory-resident. Actually, at boot time, it creates the md, mounts it to /etc, cp r /conf/base/etc/* /etc/ and finally cp -r /cfg/* /etc/. The interesting idea being you can always find your base configuration files in /conf/base/etc. Usually, when you modify some files in /etc, you just save them and that’s all, but the fact that it’s memoryresident means that if the machine reboots, you lose the changes, so you constantly have to copy your modified files from /etc to /cfg.

Being a lazy guy myself, I’ve written a simple shell script to check modified files and synchronize /etc with /cfg. I have sent it to phk and philip so I guess it will eventually be committed to src/tools/tools/nanobsd/Files/root/. In the meantime, you can get it there.

Since I wanted to use WPA (or WPA2) with my Atheros card, I needed to use hostapd, but there was no startup script, so I wrote one and committed it with dougb’s approval.

Now my WRAP is happily running FreeBSD 6.1-PRERELEASE \o/.