Here's some quick notes about the build process.

General I

The GL-iNet AR750 is an AR71xx machine with a mips_24kc processor V7.4.

Current AREDN code is a heavily customized version of OpenWrt 19.07

The family of OpenWrt modules for this machine can be found at

https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/19.07-SNAPSHOT/packages/mips_24kc/

/base contains o/s stuff, some drivers and utils
/packages contains most of everything that makes a computer useful
/telephony contains asterisk and other voip stuff

Asterisk

I went to /telephony and selected those modules that looked necessary and manually uploaded them to the node. I need to compile them into a list.

USB Drive

I used the "OpenWrt Quick Start for Adding a USB Drive" to install the support for the USB socket. This turned out to also install support for the micro-sd chip.

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/storage/usb-drives-quickstart

Some of the modules required for this came from OpenWrt but a good number came from the AREDNmesh downloads site.

https://downloads.arednmesh.org

You will have to jump around on AREDN to find the module you want.

When I was finished with installing the storage support, I could support fat32 an ext 2/3/4 file systems. ntfs support was not available. I heard somewhere that this support is not built into the custom AREDN kernel. Interesting that both fat32 and ext 2/3/4 *are* built in.

General II

Of course, if you embark on lighting up the usb port and find yourself going nowhere, make sure the usb power is enabled on the Advanced Configuration page in the node.

Module Upload Procedure

  1. Identify in advance which modules you need.
  2. Go to the OpenWrt downloads site shown above and download the identified modules to your pc
  3. Upload the modules to the node using the upload utility on the node's Administration page.
  4. Observe the results of each upload and go back and download the unmet dependencies to your pc.
  5. Upload the unmet dependencies to the node and then continue uploading modules identified in step 1. Repeat for new unmet dependencies.
  6. When all modules from step 1 have been uploaded, reboot the node for all the new modules to take effect.
  7. SSH into the node and do any required configuration work. reboot the node when finished.
I don't think the node has to be rebooted after each module upload. But, it should be rebooted when you are finished all uploads and configuration. If you need to test along the way, reboot before each test. This will ensure that the modules are indeed loaded.

The opkg package manager can be useful for identifying which modules have been loaded.

Keep an eye on the free flash space left on a the node. If you run out of space, you will need to provide the usb/sd support and move some or all of your modules over to it to free up native flash memory.

Newly installed storage will need to be mounted at some point in the file system. Use the mount -t command for that. Create a script to do this every time the node boots up. Or, follow the instructions on how to make appropriate entries in the /etc/fstab file.

2022-02-17 N2MH