Pogoplug v4 potentially bricked

[beyondbuxton]

Hello all:

I bought the Pogoplug v4 thinking it'd be a great small, low-power box to run samba and apache. And it is.

I followed the great howto/script to get Arch installed on it. All went well. Until I got a little carried away and edited hbmgr.rc in a misguided effort to remove the phone-home daemon from the startup. So now I'm left with a box that boots to some point and sits there - no IP (fails ping and dhcp server shows nothing of it's MAC in reservation table). I think I understand why. But I am at a loss of how to fix this.

Is there anything I could/should try or have I created a $40 paperweight?

Thanks for your help,
BeyondBuxton

[KennethC]

$40? You got it from Amazon.com didn't you? It's more like a $70 paperweight.

Have you try reverting it?
Here is how, if you haven't try that.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'Revert to Stock Firmware
We understand that some people don't wish to stay with Arch Linux ARM and just want to get their plug back to the way it was out of the box. The process of reverting to stock has been made very simple for this device:

1.Shut down the device, remove any drives you have attached
2.On a FAT32 USB drive, create a folder named "revert"
3.Plug this drive into the top USB port, and power on the plug
4.The LED will stay blinking green for a moment, then turn red. This signals that the stock firmware is operating. You should be able to find the device on my.pogoplug.com again.
')
Steps copied from http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5/pogoplug-series-4

Good luck!

[beyondbuxton]

Kenneth, thank you for the suggestions.

Amazon did have a pretty amazing deal on it.

Forgive me for not stating this previously: I had created the FAT32-formatted USB key and plugged it into the USB port on the top of the device (under the cover). After intially not getting any results, I had abandoned that path. Coming back to it again at your suggestion, I imagine my shock as I absent-mindedly pinged the box (static DHCP mapping) some hours later and received a response. Which makes me think it's doing exactly what I had asked of it: boot, get an address, and... sit there. I had disabled the part of hbmgr.rc that prompts it to fire up the hbmgr service (and thus the native busybox). Of course I had neglected to install sshd before rebooting to test the changed I'd made to hbmgr.rc.

I've seen mention of a serial cable. I doubt it's worth the cost of one of those to me as I'll probably never use it again. I'm an admin (at best), not a developer. Looking on the bright side of things: at least it's secure!

Anybody have any other suggestions/ideas?

Thanks,
BB

[moonman]

You didn't alter the bootloader so you are fine. I have no idea what hbmgr.rc is and it seems it's part of the nand pogoplug os, and not archlinuxarm so archlinuxarm should still bootup no problem. You can reinstall archlinuxarm, just follow the guide in my signature and use ext3 filesystem for the partition at step 5.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('beyondbuxton', 'O')f course I had neglected to install sshd before rebooting to test the changed I'd made to hbmgr.rc

[beyondbuxton]

Thank you for the suggestions moonman.

While looking at the link in your signature, it dawned on me that I hadn't yet worked with ArchLinuxARM-armv5te-latest.tar.gz. While I don't know what instructions I had been following (clearly not the proper ones), it would appear that I'm roughly at step #8 of the following:

http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5 ... g-series-4

Following the wrong directions initially, I created the thumbdrive, killed hbwd, remounted the rootfs on the pp4 itself as rw, and proceeded to modify the rcS and fstab on the pp4 itself. I rebooted and things "sort of" worked. I could initially get logged in via ssh to the pp4. Then after I modified an .rc file to kill the startup of hbwd and subsequently rebooted, I was left with no busybox on the pp4. In hindsight, a few things make more sense now that I've read the link I just posted above (eg, why does rcS not mount /dev/sdb1 properly, ...)

Where I am now: it's still the nand pogoplug os installed on the device (I'm assuming that's the stock os (which is what I still have in some form)). It boots and gets an ip. And then nothing - there are no daemons of any kind listening. I prevented the stock busybox from loading. So... now what? Heh

Forgive me if I'm leaving anything out- I clearly don't know enough about this yet to add anything to the discussion.

Thank you,
BB

[KennethC]

So can you still SSH in? And if yes, can you do any command?

[beyondbuxton]

I am unable to ssh in. No services of any kind (including sshd) are listening as far as I can tell (I ran nmap against the box). It has an IP and will respond to ping but that is it.

[beyondbuxton]

It's late, I'm exhausted after a long day, so one final thought before anybody really starts scratching their head: after going back through logs, turns out it was directions for 'optware' that I had been following. At this point I don't know if that makes a difference or not? Thanks again guys!

[moonman]

Well, if that was optware that you installed then you dont have a proper bootloader installed to boot off of usb drive. You have to get serial to recover, specifically usb to ttl adapter. They are 2-5 bucks on ebay.

[beyondbuxton]

Ok, thank you for the suggestion to use a usb ttl adapter. I can afford $5 - I had heard they were significantly more expensive. This will be a bit of learning experience for me. I'd be happy to write up how things go if it'd help the next person who winds up in this situation.

Thank you both for your help.

BB