-
WiFi issues resolved
10/27/2016 at 22:12 • 0 commentsI have had nothing but trouble getting the hub to connect and stay connected to my wireless router. I recently figured out the cause. I had placed my hub about ~5 ft from my router, and evidently that was close enough to saturate the hub's wifi radio. I moved it to the other side of the room and it has worked perfectly since then.
-
Firmware update & Root Wink forums
07/24/2015 at 03:42 • 0 commentsSo after the wink's Epic Fail, I could no longer use the smartphone app. (BTW I made bank on their screw up though, and got a power genius bar for the cost of shipping. Woot! BTW it works great as-is, no tweaking req'd like the hub) So I decided to update to the newest firmware, v 1.01, details on that in a bit. I also discovered this nifty site rootwink.com, with some nice tutorials, one of which I followed. Before I get into how my firmware upgrade went, here's some useful tutorials I found:
A better tutorial for the cron daemon
Read about my firmware upgrade experience before attempting these:
Firmware upgrade preserving root
Root any firmware the hard way
So, my firmware upgrade fiasco. I began following the procedure in the "firmware upgrade preserving root" link posted above. Here's where I went wrong: my SSH access was dependent upon entering a root password instead of the RSA key method. If you don't want to mess with the serial terminal, make sure you can SSH with the RSA key. So anyway, I followed the said tutorial without problem up till the step where you reboot into the upgrade/recovery partition. That's where I lost SSH access. Oh, and once set to boot to the upgrade/recovery partition, it won't boot to the normal OS until the upgrade is finished. Essentially it was bricked. Fortunately, you can recover from this using the serial console, as described in the "root any firmware the hard way" link. Here's the difficult part: you have to short pin 29 on the NAND chip to ground on powerup and get the timing just right. Short it while powering on or too soon (I believe about 1 sec after power on), and the bootloader won't go. Half a second too late, and the OS boots. Oh, and those pins are tiny! Anyway, a bunch of bad words later, I got it back up and running.
-
Crontab MIA
04/05/2015 at 13:44 • 0 commentsHmmm... my wifi router went haywire causing the hub to lose its wifi connection and went to its "blinking pink" factory reset state. Restarted the whole system and it reconnected without having to set it up all over again. However, in this process, somehow my crontab file got deleted. Don't know if that is because the /var/spool directory doesn't get written to the flash or if there is some kind of tamper-proofing script that found it and deleted it upon reboot. (If you know, comment) Anyway, lesson learned, make a backup copy. I'm putting mine in root's home folder; I'm pretty sure that does get written to the flash. In any case, I'll find out...