Soekris net4826 with a wistron CM9 power

A Soekris net4826 with a wistron CM9 mini-pci card using monowall 1.3b9 with the wireless card running as DHCP server and the ethernet port as the gateway uses 5 watts of power whilst idle.

Simple way to flash a Soekris net4826

As the compact flash on these is soldered onto the board you have install your operating system via PXE boot. You will need to attach the net4826 to the serial port on your computer and use a terminal emulator like Hyperterminal in windows, minicom or CuteCom in linux.

Rather than setup PXE I use the excellent Pyramid/Metrix bootable CD which you can get from this page. This boots an old version of ubuntu from which you open a terminal and type su to get root access with the password "root" then type "pxe-start.sh". From this CD you can only flash certain images but if you want to flash a different file you should rename your file to one of the ones in the /var/www directory from the computer menu on the cd and overwrite the file using the cp command from the terminal. Then boot up your net4826 and from the terminal emulator press "control-P" then type "boot f0" this will start the PXE boot sequence and your terminal will list the OS's you can flash. You can choose the one you overwrote on the tempoary virtual drive that the ubuntu CD creates. I used this method to flash a net4826 with the locustworld images.

The only problem I have found is using the old ubuntu CD can lead to a lack of support for newer networking cards. This will become more of a problem over time unless they update the CD.

Introduction

On this blog I will document the process of building and modifying wireless access points using soekris wrap alix and ITX hardware. Hopefully this will help others and act as a reminder to me how I succeeded or failed with different hardware and software.