[CUWiN-Dev] Re: CUWIN on Meraki Mini

[Bob Keyes]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Matthew Isaacs wrote:

>
> On Thu, 2008-02-07 at 15:31 -0500, Bob Keyes wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I am interested in porting CuWIN to the Netgear WGT634U, which I have
> > about 30 of, and my friend has about 50 of. They are very similar to the
> > Meraki Mini and the FON, but better, because they have mini-PCI socketed
> > Atheros cards and a USB 2.0 controller. Considering the low price of USB
> > flash these days, I plan on taking advantage of this (I only wish there
> > were right-angle or short USB extender cables that were cheap - having the
> > USB flash stick out of the unit like that makes it physically vulnerable
> > to being bumped).
> >
> > What I'd like to know, is how to go from NetBSD source to CuWIN - i.e. how
> > to do the vast amount of binary shrinkage needed to fit on small flash
> > devices. I know there's a tool, I can't remember the name of it now, that
> > combines a bunch of BSD binaries into one executable, making it smaller.
> > But this didn't seem to save much, because of the large size of libraries
> > needed (Maybe I should have built everything static?).
> >
>
> Crunchgen is the name of the tool.

yes thank you for reminding me of the name.

> There has been some work on using it
> to reduce the size of the image, however I am unsure of the status of
> the project.  I believe it was discovered that even crunched the image
> comes up a bit large.  There are other projects under way and proposed
> to reduce the size of some components.  The big 2 here is DHCP and DNS.
> ISC-DHCP and BIND (client resolver) consume a lot of flash real estate.

How about moving to DJB's TinyDNS? It's nice and small, the only problem
is the license. MaraDNS might be viable, it's a decent piece of software
and its under a BSD license.

> Several months ago I started porting udhcp to NetBSD as a possible
> replacement for ISC-DHCP.  WIDE is another alternative that is under
> consideration.Unfortunately, I haven't had time lately to work on the
> port.

The problem with udhcp is that it's under the GPL, and that might strike
some annoyance with the BSD purists (I, myself, am not a purist by I do
respect their point of view)

It might be worth looking at other small dhcp implementations, and if
they're not BSD licensed, ask the author if they would be willing to BSD
license them. If not, perhaps write our own?

But, while we're on the topic of licenses, I should think back to the fact
that I haven't really looked at the licensing for CuWIN and I ought to,
just so no toes get stepped on.