Is there a openwrt/lede that works on the bpi r2 that I can download from a English website?

Banana Pi Router design
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@frank-w, Ok, after extensive testing of various images, I wanted to install the openwrt for the BPI R2.

So after trying to write the image to a sd card (using the command: dd if=mtk-bpi-r2-SD.img of=/dev/sdc ), I examined the card with gparted.

The dd command stated that the image was written to the card – stating the following text:
136704+1 records in
136704+1 records out
69992452 bytes (70 MB) copied, 17.7135 s, 4.0 MB/s

However, when examining the card afterwards, gparted showed that the card had nothing written to it (and therefore displayed an unpartitioned medium)

Also tried to compile the image using your instructions (ref: http://www.fw-web.de/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:bpi-r2:lede ) using two separate environments (OpenSuse on an actual workstation and the latest Ubuntu version within a VM), both attempts failed during the compilation process.

These issues coupled with the problems of other images not being able to create fixed MAC addresses are wasting a lot of my time (and now are eating into my productivity time, which is costing me not only time but also actual money).

Could you please confirm that the images you supplied via your Google Drive account do actually work and provide any clues why the provided images do not successfully write to a SD card (note: I am not using any cheap cards but am actually using SanDisk approved medium)

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As i said before,i have not tried them yet because of other things to do. But i assume that lede does not have a partition-table like standard-linux system because lede is for embedded systems and not for pc-systems. So lede does not need a partition table.

Try to boot it up…i confirm that i have only compiled last working source (last commits have problems)

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@frank-w, Ok, seems a bit odd to me about lacking a partition table but I will try it. If there is no table, than I presume that the image can’t be resized once “burnt” on to the medium and therefore will only use use approximately 70MB (making the rest of the medium redundant)?

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@frank-w, I am asking about partition tables not only because of the size requirements of the medium but also due to the possibility of including a swap partition and the extra need for squid / proxy caching.

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@frank-w, I can confirm that the image does not work. After writing the image to the medium, placing the medium into the card interface / slot and then inserting the power jack, all three back (RGB) leds are activated, then after 5 seconds, the front three leds activate (blue for about 0.5 secs, followed by a single flash of the green and then the front red for 8 seconds), which is followed by a quick flash of the rj45 leds ( also during the cycling of the front led, the back green stayed on only to be switched off 1 second after the RJ45s flickered), finally followed by a static red led on the back.

Also just before the RJ45 lights, the screen (via hdmi) flickers a bright purple. I am guessing that this sequence is some form of POST procedure.

As stated above, after the sequence the back red stays powered and there is no further output via the hdmi or any other led.

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Hdmi does not work in lede,purple screen is reported before. You can use deburg-uart for looking whats going on or you know the network-config. Leds are stable after boot…

i dont know if dhcp is actice on any port…you can try it and look in log of your router

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Also, just to clarify, I have the R2 version1.2 model (this model lacks a lipo battery connector and is replaced with a SD / EMMC switch) – I have noticed that SinoVoIP has not provided the schematics to this particular version (with the exception of the switch and the lack of a second RVT capacitor on the rear of the device, it seems to be the same as the v1.1).

I have included a photo of this newer version of the board (apologies for the bad lighting and grainy image but I think you can clearly see the differences between this newer version and v1.1 – also ignore the heatsinks which have been added by myself).

WP_20180218_001

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@frank-w, Not using a router to connect with the board (I have a customised IPtable based firewall / network switch that is connected within my infrastructure and am only using fixed IP addressing – should be able to customised the IP address via the terminal). Also only the rear red led is stable after the post.

I will try the UART and report back.

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@frank-w The UART did work. I noticed that the root partition is 1022.7m (just under a standard IEEE-1541 gigabyte) and the only NIC that has an IP is br-lan (192.168.1.1 /24).

Question: on an un-configured openwrt does eth0 need a DHCP server?

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Also there are only two logfiles within /var/log (which is a symlink to /tmp/log). lastlog and wtmp are empty (0 bytes)

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Something that is concerning me is that according to ifconfig there is no wlan0. Do you know if the WiFi chipset works with this distro (I have a need to create an access point and bridge it with the 4 port network switch)?

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One finial point, I have noticed that lan0 - lan3 shares the same MAC address as eth0 and not eth1 as would be expected.

screenshot3

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Eth0 should be the ethernet-lane between mt7623 (soc) and mt7530 (switch). So here you need no ip-configuration. Maybe your wan-port must be adapted to your local net (if not 192.168.1.x).

But i have no experience in lede…i only compiled and uploaded it. Maybe you can add a partition table to use the other space to your card. I assume that the first 70mb contains a filesystem that is unpacked to a ramdisk. Your partitiontable have to start after the first 70mb (better more)

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I am also concerned about the randomised MAC addressing (as shown by other distributions). Does this effect this distro in the same way?

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As the ports/chips seem to have no burned-in-adress this will affect all OS which did not set the adress in any way (dts,network-config).

Before create/modify the partitiontable you can look with a hex-editor in the image if the blocks are set or you try it and if it failes restore first 512 bytes on your sd from the image

Eth1 is maybe used for wan-port and mac-adress should be the same here.Have you a wan-device (i see no on your screenshot)

Wifi-device should be ap0 instead of wlanx…but i assume you must create it like in ubuntu/debian with wmt-tools (wmt_loader,stp_uart_launcher,echo A > /dev/wmtWifi)

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@Frank-w, Seeing that I want to incorporate a HUWEI E3372 LTE / 4G Ethernet USB device into this board (which I did with my old Banana R1 installation), I think I am going to revert to using either the provided CentOS or Debian images for this board (and install the distro onto the EMMC).

Have you got any extra suggestions for this setup? Also note that on the previous board, I used Webmin (a distro / architecture neutral browser based interface) which I am intending to use within this next setup.

38

Some infos you found on the storage/emmc-page on my wiki. Basicly ist works like normal sdcard except the preloader on boot0-partition. You can use any image which works on sd,but you must ensure it is not too big for emmc (7,2xGb) and you must boot the right partition and change mountpoints to point on emmc instead of sdcard.

You can use kernel 4.14 if you don’t need hdmi else you have to use 4.4er kernel

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@frank-w, Thanks for the info and help.
I am intending to use the provided CentOS image and if I come up with a good solution, I will create an image and uploaded it to a public accessible URL.