Dockstar notes: buying a used one with telnetd and sshd disabled, enabling telnetd to get NetBSD installed.

[Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost>]

I got another dockstar which was already connected to the online
service (pogoplug?) which hoses it for people like us :)

These are mostly just my notes about working on it and getting it
useable like my other one. I got all this info off the 'net, but I
figured I'd put it all in one place for the NetBSDer.

When I received it, I plugged it in and watched my dhcp server hand it
an address. I scanned it and confirmed that this device does not like
to party:

$ nmap -p1-65535 192.168.0.46

Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2011-06-25 14:38 MST
Nmap scan report for 192.168.0.46
Host is up (0.018s latency).
Not shown: 65532 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
80/tcp   open  http
443/tcp  open  https
3333/tcp open  dec-notes

Those web ports do nothing when you try to connect.

I bought a Nokia "CA-42" cable, which is a 3.3v uplcom serial device,
from one of the many people selling them on Ebay. You have to cut the
phone end off and connect the proper wires to the Dockstar board to
get a serial console. Mine has 3 wires: ground, Tx and Rx. I saw notes
that the wire colors vary, so your best bet to figure out what is what
is this here picture:

http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/File:CA-42_DKU-5_pinout.jpg

from this nice page:
http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/Use_a_Nokia_Serial_Cable_on_an_ARM9_Linkstation

There are a few articles about how to hook up one of these to the
Dockstar, and at least one appears wrong. Here's my experience:

Open the Dockstar by pulling it out the bottom of the housing. You'll
need to unplug the USB dock port cable from the board.

There is a 10 pin connector (header?) on the opposite side of the
ethernet jack. The pin nearest the edge of the board and closest to
the LED light is ground. The one directly to the left is Tx. The one
to the left of Tx is Rx. I bought a 10 pin ribbon cable plug and just
pushed the wires from the serial cable through the appropriate pins to
make it work. It's kinda hairy, but it works for now.

I used minicom on a NetBSD machine. On my machine, it was /dev/ttyU0,
115200 8-N-1. I also noticed that this works on a Mac:

screen -U /dev/tty.usbserial 115200

Plug in the Dockstar and you start seeing the Linux messages whizzing
by (hopefully we can solve that soon :) ).

It ends up with a bash prompt.

Do this:

mount -o rw,remount /

This makes / read-write from what I can tell.

Edit /etc/init.d/rcS with vi.

Uncomment this line:

telnetd

Then exit and reboot. This should enable telnetd upon reboot.

If you don't want to reboot, you can set up the ethernet port like this:

ifconfig eth0 inet 192.168.0.46 netmask 255.255.255.0
(use your own values)

And start telnetd manually:

telnetd

Then telnet to the device using root and the password is stxadmin

From here you can telnet in and follow directions I got from Jean-Yves
Moulin on this post:

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-arm/2011/06/14/msg001217.html

I'm working on getting NetBSD/evbarm -current installed on mine right now.

Andy