Soekris port (Read Only Filesystem)

Right now our biggest issue with porting over to the Soekris machine is that the filesystem installed is Read Only.  The only luck I had with writing to files were those that had symbolic link permissions (i.e. files that had permissions that started with "l").

Without being able to change file permissions we cannot write to any directory that is not a symbolically linked file. These are things I tried, to no avail because of this crux

• apt-get install - doesn't work because it references a log file to check if a certain
• scp 
• tar
• chmod
• chown

Also the OS does not have Make installed. This is also crippling because we need make to install make, and also any other program that uses make.

Here are other things that are not installed

• sudo
• man

needless to say I am really up a creek without a paddle with this thing. However there is good news. dnsmasq is already installed! We can't change its dnsmasq.conf file because of aforementioned permissions problems, but if we can get over that, we are only a hop skip and a jump away from getting this thing up and running.

Here is my suggestion.

We create a new linux image on a different system (one that we can actually write to/read from) with all of the things we need preconfigured. Then we reimage the Soekris box with this custom OS

I didn't have time to look at solutions to the UDP issues, however I did find that Multicast DNS is used by Macs to do service/device discovery. While this does not solve our problems it does help us understand why we were getting these weird UDP errors since we were using my Macbook pro to test MAR

Thats all for now.

-Ryan