Steve's Blog

Western Digital MyNet N600 OpenWRT support
Posted - Comments
By Steven Haigh 1 min read

After starting the wiki page on the WD N600 about 3 months ago, and posting about it in the OpenWRT forums, I’m proud to announce that OpenWRT is now supported on the WD N600.

I installed the luci web interface, configured it up and installed some basic tools, and the following is still available:

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Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs                   12.5M      1.2M     11.3M   9% /
/dev/root                 1.8M      1.8M         0 100% /rom
tmpfs                    61.7M    880.0K     60.9M   1% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock7           12.5M      1.2M     11.3M   9% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay       12.5M      1.2M     11.3M   9% /
tmpfs                   512.0K         0    512.0K   0% /dev

Its quite a capable CPU:

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# cat /proc/cpuinfo
system type             : Atheros AR9344 rev 2
machine                 : WD My Net N600
processor               : 0
cpu model               : MIPS 74Kc V4.12
BogoMIPS                : 278.93
wait instruction        : yes
microsecond timers      : yes
tlb_entries             : 32
extra interrupt vector  : yes
hardware watchpoint     : yes, count: 4, address/irw mask: [0x0000, 0x0ff8, 0x0ff8, 0x0ff8]
isa                     : mips1 mips2 mips32r1 mips32r2
ASEs implemented        : mips16 dsp dsp2
shadow register sets    : 1
kscratch registers      : 0
core                    : 0
VCED exceptions         : not available
VCEI exceptions         : not available

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# dmesg | grep MHz
[    0.000000] Clocks: CPU:560.000MHz, DDR:480.000MHz, AHB:240.000MHz, Ref:40.000MHz

See the wiki page for installation instructions!

EDIT: It seems there are some issues with previous builds that can cause wifi to drop out after periods of time. I’ve built r38259 of OpenWRT Barrier Breaker (trunk) that in theory is patched to stop this from happening. Testing is still ongoing and feedback is appreciated…

Download it here: openwrt-ar71xx-generic-mynet-n600-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin - Updated to r38362 on 11/Oct/2013

Hacking Hardware Wireless

Media Watch on the election coverage
Posted - Comments
By Steven Haigh 1 min read

I love watching Media Watch. Its a great analysis of the media and how they screw stuff up - or at least pretend to be fair…

This episode covers the election coverage and should remove any doubt as to why the L/NP won the election. Thankfully, the ABC is mostly unbiased these days. Its also interesting that one of the election policies that was rushed to the public hours before the election proposed to cut the funding to the ABC etc - something I strongly oppose.

Politics