An OpenWRT compatible router

OpenWRT 1.0 WhiteRussian RC2 or later

USB ports on your router

Installing and activating USB drivers

You should notice, that the modules and drives loaded are specifically chosen for the ASUS WL-500g Deluxe.
If you have a different router, you should consult The USB Storage Howto on OpenWRT.org


The above will install support for USB1.1 and USB2.0 devices. Both drivers for storage and printers are installed.

Next add the following to the bottom of the file /etc/modules

Now reboot your router.
After the reboot you should open a ssh connection. Try to logread to follow what happens when you connect your USB device

Now connect your USB Storage device (harddrive or usb memory stick or whatever). When I connect my USB 2.0 harddrive that is split in 3 partitions to the USB 2.0 port that is closed to the LAN ports, I see this in the log :

When connecting my USB printer to the other USB port this appears in the syslog:

If you see something simular, the kernel has found your hardware, and are now ready to use it.

Configuring Storage for use

In order to be able to actuately use the attached storage for something useful, you need to add support for filesystems to your router
The following filesystem modules are available for OpenWRT:
Most people will probably want to have support for a native linux filesystem like ext3 and also for USB Memory Sticks, which in general use VFAT (fat32 from windows). To add support for theese filesystems you need to run
:

Dont forget to add this to /etc/modules :

Either reboot your router, or execute:

In order to activate the modules.

Now you can mount your drive, in my case I mount partition 2 to /opt (which I have created with mkdir /opt beforehand)
You can now access whatever is on the device you added.
For now you will have to setup your filesystem on a real computer, as programmes like fdisk and mke2fs are not yet available for OpenWRT

Enabeling at boot-time

For making the device mount to /opt at boot time, I have made the script /etc/init.d/S11mount :

Be sure to change the MOUNT_DEVICE0 statement to whatever your device might be (usb disk, usb flash memory, ide harddrive or whatever!).

Configuring Printer for use as Networked Printer

I have chosen to install the simple p910n instead of Cups as "print server". While Cups is a full featured print server, it does depend on diskspace to spool print jobs to while printing. Since not all OpenWRT devices or installations have access to disk space, I have decided to use p910n. The p910n deamon does not spool locally,hence it will only work while the printer is actuately turned on!

Install the p910n deamon by:

The p910n deamon is started (and configured) using /etc/init.d/S51p910nd

Try to start it:

if this gives you an error like: p910nd: can't load library 'libgcc_s.so.1'   you should install libgcc:

ipkg install libgcc 

Now try to start the p910 server again.

if you see something like :

When you do a "ps" you have the deamon running, and you should be able to print RAW printing to port 9100 from anywhere on your LAN

For help in setting up your computers for RAW printing, you could check out Olegs exellent printing guide

I hope you found this tutorial useful.
Comments and questions are welcome at the Support Forum