WZR-HP-G300NH with USB External Storage

[Ratsea]

Hi All,

I have just replaced my aging DG834g with a High Power WZR-HP-G300NH.   It came with std DD-WRT v14998 installed.   Having read various forums, I set the USB access and I thought I could access the USB drive (400Gb FAT32 Seagate drive, self powered) from my Window 7 environment.
I could see it was mounted on /mnt, but couldn't find it.   I tried to install Samba2, but eventually got an error which then said, I needed a full version as I was not MIPS compatible.   The NAS option worked fine, but it was only a FTP connection, and trying to open Acronis backup of 4Gb copied the file first - very slow!!   I managed to get access to the router with PuTTy/Telnet and could see the folders on the router with WinSCP, including my mounted usb, but I couldn't explain to my other half, who also wanted the same share what was involved!!

I then loaded the user friendly firmware version 1.76, and I am up and running with a fully integrate External drive on a drive mapped 'z'.   It loads on boot, so good result.   All the windows right click attributes worked, so zip and mail and export to Sony TV/media player.   Did what it said on the tin.  

Question: How do you setup the same type of share using the DD-WRT firmware, without lots of manual intervention and unplugging the drive and replugging it to get it recogised whenever I rebooted the routed?  

 

 

[zuron]

It takes a little bit of setup and know-how. I just went through it myself yesterday. See the following thread:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=83795

 

note this links to the blog:

http://g300nh.blogspot.com/2010/06/software-installation-on-dd-wrt-part-1.html

but just a couple changes are necessary, as mentioned in the thread.

 

 

[Ratsea]

Thanks for those links.   They are very similar to what I had tried, but I shall redo it over the weekend.   I have had no trouble with the current setup using Buffalo 1.76, so I am tempted to not mend it as it's not broken!!   However, it is a bit fussy about finding the ethernet print server.

 

[zuron]

I'm still having some trouble getting media sharing to work which is what i really really wanted out of this...I may go back to the stock 'user-friendly' firmware as it was pretty easy to setup in there...unfortunately, if I recall correctly, my roommate had some significant issues with wireless traffic getting dropped while on the stock firmware

[CapnSmith]

Easiest way to get the Nas and Media Server functions on these routers is to use the User Friendly firmware.

 

To address the wireless traffic dropping, try changing the wireless channel that you are using.  I recommend 1, 6, or 11, as these are the channels that are not used by other devices such as cordless phones.

[Ratsea]

Thanks for all the advice, and I have now stuck with the 'user friendly' version v1.76.   It works fine and no drop out at all.   Will continue to watch progress of DD-Wrt, but for the time being it does all I want, and without any hassle.

[Ratsea]

I am now back with DD-WRT after loads of dropped lines and reboots with 1.76!!   I started with FW14998 (Buffalo Offical), but now have gone to 14896 (DD-WRT std).   So I am retrying to set up USB visibility on a Win7 PC.   It's easy enough as an FTP link, but I wanted to enable Samba, which is 'present' on this version (smdb --version = Version 3.0.24).   Working well with ZERO drop outs!!

 

I tried to follow the various tutorials and have not managed to get anything to work. The firat was recommended ( http://g300nh.blogspot.com/2010/06/samba-sharing-in-dd-wrt.html) said if you get the version, just do 'opkg install samba3' and you are away.  

 

This was no good as Optware wasn't loaded, so no Opkg.  I followed the instruction for loading it from the part 1 section of the above link, but I could get it to load and run.   I get read only error or the files I am trying to modify, so I am obviously missing something in the execute file/folder pointer settings (eg mkdir: cannot create directory '//usr/local/lib/': Read-only file system).

 

I am a total newbie on Linux, but can follow a tutorial.   The other confusion is that I have a WZR-HP-G300NH, with an Atheros AR9132 rev 2 (0xb9), yet the Kernel is 2.6.24.111 which I thought was Broadcom).

 

Please could someone point me in a new direction for installing Optware on this HP300NH so I vcan get Samba working and then look at the other things I can do as well.

 

Thanks

[Ratsea]

Success!!

 

I have finally managed to integrate a USB HDD into my Windows 7 network - just as it says on the box!!.   I didn't need any of the Optware / Samba downloads, just added the script for Start-up from here - http://dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Buffalo_WZR-HP-G300NH, and using the DD-wrt firmware (14896), it all worked.  Rebooted everything - I needed to replug the USB cable for it recognise it, but that's all.   I should be able to fix that is the start-up script.

 

The drive is a single partition 400Gb Seagate, in FAT32.

 

 

[Ratsea]

Well 80% Success!

 

I haven't found a way to make the Windows Shared folder 'writable'.   You can't even copy to it from a networked PC.  If I change the USB format to Ext2/3, it works, but not FAT.   I couldn't connect it directly then, and it's got a lot of backup stuff that I must not lose, so I don't want to reformat.

 

It also connects though FTP, and you can copy and delete files, but not edit and update.   I was hoping to use Acronis to back up to this HDD, but unless this is resolved, it fails.

 

Any clues?   I have been looking at changing 'Fstab' and making an extra line for VFAT default - any pointers here?

[alxjm69]

@Ratsea

 

That last link goes nowhere. So everything is working fine?

 

I was thinking of changing firmware to the stock 1.76.

 

UPDATE:

 

Seems like we replied at the same time.

 

I think your USB disk needs to be formatted to something other than FAT or FAT32.

[Ratsea]

@ alxjm69

 

I have just done that too and am back on 1.76.   Everything is working on the USB including R&W to the FAT format.   Fingers crossed on the drop outs now.   It wasn't easy going back to 1.76 as it kept failing.   I had to go via 1.65 first.

[emarginatus]

Could you explain in more detail what you did?

The same smb.conf has different behaviour if the mounted filesystem is ext2/ext3 or vfat? Could you post its content?

Anyway, run "mount" from a shell to see what (and how) is mounted in both cases, and look at ownership/permissions at mountpoints.

 

[Ratsea]

Your question relates to DD-WRT firmware, which I had been using and had some difficulty setting up with USB storage.   My last post about 1.76 is the latest Buffalo Stock firmaware which has no access to the router other than through the Web GUI (that I can see!!).  

 

Your question is the one I was also asking about how to create write access if you use the DD_WRT v14892 (not the Buffalo version of DD-WRT 14998, which does not have Samba support included).   I had been successful with the USB setup from this link:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Buffalo_WZR-HP-G300NH , and if the drive was EXT2, it had write access, but not if Fat32 - sorry if this is all a repeat.  I did not alter the smb.conf file from the original, but was thinking thta it need an extra mount statement with some extra values for Fstab to cover Vfat formats.   Then I got stuck, as there are lots of suggestions but I couldn't work out the syntax to give me a new Fstab on somewhere  writeable, like the USB or JFFS.   I have only just started playing with Linux.

 

I am happy with 1.76 at the moment.   It started with drop outs but I changed to fixed IP's and set the Rekey = 0 and I have had no more.   I have yet to test the external route to the USB, so there may still be surprises - I could get it to work originally.

[emarginatus]

I'm running the shipped dd-wrt 14998 and have succeeded in setting up ushare to stream audio files towards a media-player. I simply downloaded some packages from http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/packages/ and installed them directly on the external storage; all the stuff is set up by event- or cron-driven shell scripts.

In my spare time I'll try to do the same with samba and let you know.

Anyway if the data you will put on are very important to you, think about migrating to a journaled filesystem, like ext3 or xfs. If you are not familiar/comfortable with linux filesystems, ntfs might be ok, just make sure that  the dd-wrt's kernel version is already writing-capable, but it should.