Good idea, if not for anything else it frees a bit of additional space. But it's not helping as much as one would think. A quick test shows that this would free up only around 550 kB. On 22.03 that might give juuuuust enough space to upload one firmware binary into the uncompressed filesystem -- certainly not two. On snapshot (i.e., OpenWrt's next version) it is cutting it darn close and might not even free enough space to upload one and leave enough space for the router to function properly.
The best way still stands: Need custom firmware binary with 8MB flash - use imagebuilder to put it into compressed squashfs.
Realistically, Lantiq devices with 8MB flash are pretty much on life support going into the future.
I hope for some more life time for devices with USB ports
We just need a firmware where optional packages for USB storage can fit.
In critical situation I would prefer some system packages moved to optional (installed after Overlay).
I personally use USB Overlay filesystem for my device for about 5 years now.
Still on the same Sandisk UltraFit 16GB with 3 partitions (rootfs, swap, data) and don't experience any problems related to speed or reliability. DynDNS, Unbound and BanIP working.
Until I change my ISP to other technology, for DSL it's good and stable device with openwrt.
Unfortunately, don't know of any alternatives for it...
Make one. And I'm not being snide: With the online imagebuilder-chef-thingy it's really easy to include the necessary packages into the compressed squashfs system. And then you're free to install everything else on your USB drive however you see fit.
But an official build including those packages? That would open up a can of worms where everyone and their wifi-enabled vacuum cleaner has their own idea of what should be included beyond the common base system. Didn't happen before, and I'd wager it will not happen in the future. I wouldn't hold my breath.
Thanks for suggestion. Found a builder https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/, but my first try with removed xDSL blob-files was not successful. Will try again later.
I have no experience with building images but if the devs don't include a smaller standard image this could be my only option left.
It should be pretty simple, when customizing the list of to-be-installed packages, mark the respective packages as "not to be included" by prefixing a minus/dash: -dsl-vrx200-firmware-xdsl-a -dsl-vrx200-firmware-xdsl-b-patch
(Full disclosure: I didn't try that with the online imagebuilder, I build my images locally and it works slightly differently.)
I've noticed the reboot issue with the BT hub 5a gets substantially worse with the more/larger versions of modules built into the kernel and packages included in the build. One of my recent builds of the master branch with lots of stuff like batman-adv and wpad wolfssl built in resulted in one of my routers taking at least an hour to boot successfully.
So, as rc4 was getting stuck in prolonged reboots at start-up, I had a stab at building a version of OpenWrt 22.03.0-rc4 r19426-2b1941e47d with Luci omitted based on this guide and inadvertently managed to omit lots of modules such as wpad and wireless too from the sysupgrade file, which for all the ones I noticed were missing I've installed from the feeds along with luci, and it boots/reboots pretty reliably so far.
Seems that the online builder has currently some problem to build custom images, still the same error.
I'm not in hurry, can wait until the problem gets resolved.
Also don't want to mess my production system until final version of 22.03 arrives (21.02.3 is very stable).
I've installed 22.03.0-rc4 on my Raspberry Pi2 but unable to get the (WAN interface) TP-Link UE300 to work because it needs the kmod-usb-net-rtl8152 module installed which I am not able to because apparently it's looking for the r8152-firmware dependency which I can't find in both kmod and package repositories. Could someone please tell me where to download this, or if there's a work around.
If there's any consolation, version 21.02.03 does not require this package dependency.
It seems that containers can no longer access the internet through OpenWrt. In release version 21.02.0 (version currently running in my production setup) the container is able to access the internet.
We're hoping if we could get some idea here on what could be causing this problem, or if the tutorial for setting up pihole on Docker should be updated for 22.03. Could it be that the switch nft/firewall4 has affected in someway?
EDIT:
So basically, if container tries to reach anything outside the docker network, it gets a Destination Port Unreachable. I tried for example the below on:
docker run -it nicolaka/netshoot ping 8.8.8.8
And this is output on 22.03.0-rc4:
root@OpenWrt:~# docker run -it nicolaka/netshoot ping 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
From 172.17.0.1 icmp_seq=1 Destination Port Unreachable
From 172.17.0.1 icmp_seq=2 Destination Port Unreachable
From 172.17.0.1 icmp_seq=3 Destination Port Unreachable
From 172.17.0.1 icmp_seq=4 Destination Port Unreachable
From 172.17.0.1 icmp_seq=5 Destination Port Unreachable
From 172.17.0.1 icmp_seq=6 Destination Port Unreachable
From 172.17.0.1 icmp_seq=7 Destination Port Unreachable
From 172.17.0.1 icmp_seq=8 Destination Port Unreachable
^C
--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 0 received, +8 errors, 100% packet loss, time 7261ms
I would say it is different for every release depending of what is new.
For the 22.03 we will probably need to see a very stable and working fw4 before it is any point of making a actual release. If the firewall doesn’t work then the whole security concept of OpenWrt kind of fails.
And the future life of add on packages like BanIP working with fw4 is still to come.
Developer meeting minutes are sporadically published (here) from time to time with development news, updates and release schedule targets; however, no news since March.
I understood your point that anything not stable or fully functional has the potential to be a security risk. I was wondering if you were aware of something specific that was not stable or not working in the current fw4 implementation that is known to make 22.03rcx insecure.
I was able to build firmware with my own application on rc3, but when building on rc4 it is complaining about missing on packages libmosquitto and libgps missing, I can't find them on make menuconfig and they were not downloaded.
WARNING: Makefile 'package/feeds/sio_packages/infosys/Makefile' has a dependency on 'libmosquitto', which does not exist
WARNING: Makefile 'package/feeds/sio_packages/infosys/Makefile' has a dependency on 'libgps', which does not exist
I checked my git checkout, seems correct. May be I am missing something obvious? git checkout v22.03.0-rc4
