It started with a workshop

With some friends, we decided to have a workshop around the [Piratebox][], so we ordered a lot of TP-link WR703n and started to flash them.

They are labelled as 1.6 revision, but we discovered it the hard way they’re not (worse, some of them actually are, and we were lucky on the first one we tried). So, basically we created some bricks and people were going home without their PirateBox, which is sad.

The trunk was building fine, but the snapshots on OpenWRT.org were built without USB modules, and they are mandatory for the PirateBox to works. I had a host with the full openwrt toolchains, so I started playing around with it and, finally, built a workable firmware for this hardware revision.

How canI use it

It works almost like on the original tutorial except that the firmware you need to download is this one and, that on the steps Install Piratebox you need to change the command issued on step 2 like this:

cd /tmp opkg update && opkg install http://piratebox.aod-rpg.de/piratebox_0.6.3_all.ipk --force-depends

Note the force-depends added at the end of line. It is mandatroy, because I build the binary ‘losetup’ inside busybox, not as a package, so opkg won’t find it.

You will have some error message written, speaking about missing dependencies, but you can ignore them.

Reboot your routeur, and now, everything should works.

Want to build your own?

So, in caseyou wantto have fun with the openwrt toolchains, I’ve pushed my openwrt env in gitorious