I recently purchased a Medion MD86097 wireless hub from Aldi UK. These went for 40UKP.
It has an ethernet port, wireless N/B/G, 4 USB ports and an audio output. There is a manual on www.medion.co.uk . No sign of GPL sources so a query has been sent to them.
It is possible to telnet into the device (using admin instead of root as the username) without any hacking at all and from that some info can be gathered, though the busybox is lacking any usable file transfer tools, no normal USB drivers at all so you can't just copy files to a memory stick.
It runs linux kernel 2.6.21. CPU is described as "Ralink SoC". RAM is 32MB, Flash is 4MB. Looks like it has a serial console too but nothing connected to the outside.
There is what looks like a proprietary webserver. Firmware upgrades go through that. The actual main network USB functionality of the device looks like it comes through a proprietary protocol. The kernel contains various things called "netusb" but Google search comes up empty.
I managed to get binaries across to the device using an mipsel toolchain. This allowed me to dump the contents of the internal flash.
Bootloader looks like it is U-BOOT.
There is a combined kernel+ramdisk image.
At this point I'm a bit stuck as to what to do next. Is there some way to probe what U-BOOT can do (e.g. tftp)? Is there some way to extract the ramdisk from the combined image?
I think this little device has a lot of potential if it could be reflashed with something more standard.
Steve.