Extend OpenWrt
An OpenWrt router needs to be extended a bit to run big stuff. For instance to build a git-hub. The installed size of git is 91MB. One has an external USB HDD, of course, but what is the right way to do it? The forums are full of extroots and opts and similar stuff. I think they are all evil.
Extroot seems to involve compiling custom firmware images, while /opt brakes the nice Unixy directory structure (standard locations of programs, libs and daemons). There must be a better way:
Mount a partition of an external USB HDD to /usr
Just think about it. The really big files go to /usr/bin /usr/sbin and /usr/lib almost exclusively. Only small stuff goes to /etc, like config files and daemon startup scripts.
Today my theory was confirmed by practice. It’s very simple. These are the important steps:
1. Create an ext3 partition on your HDD just for this purpose
I actually did the partitioning before, on my normal Ubuntu laptop. It’s 2 GB and it’s called /dev/sda2 on the router.
2. Mount it to /opt temporarily
Create the /opt directory (or whatever else) temporarily and mount your partition into it using LUCI/Administration/System/Mount Points.
3. Copy the entire contents of /usr to /opt
The goal is that, initially, /usr looks the same with or without mounting something into it.
$ cp -dpr /usr/* /opt # preserve symlinks
4. Mount partition to /usr
Unmount /dev/sda2 from /opt, mount it into /usr using LUCI. You can also delete the temporary /opt directory.
5. Update /etc/opkg.conf
This involves OpenWrt’s most mysterious concept, overlay. Changing the line below has no effect except to calm down the worrying router about available storage-size for new packages:
option overlay_root /usr
You’re ready to install anything. As for me, I’ve since reinstalled mc and git. No dirty hacks this time with inserting /opt into PATH and manually creating some symlinks from /usr to /opt/usr. Just installed them like a breeze. My github is up and running again.
