extroots

the extroots is a mechanism to transfer our instalation to external device like flashdrive / hardisk external. it's very important, because basicly the mr3020 doesnt have enough space in memory to install thing such luci (web interface). after flashing the kernel we should access the mr3020 via telnet / putty. Be sure to understand the basic of linux command line before you do this.

this is my 16gb sandisk cruzher. i have formatted it to ext2 with mini tool partition wizard home edition.
I format the flashdisk to 8gb fat32
(to save data whenever i want plug in to a windows operating system), 100mb linux swap,  adding some additional virtual ram. And the rest space of the flashdisk to ext-2 format.

now proceed to our devices...  plug in our usb flash drives.

install requirement packet by typing opkg install [packet_name]

• block-mount
• kmod-usb-storage
• kmod-fs-ext4

now proceed to edit the fstab configuration...

vi /etc/config/fstab



config global automount
        option from_fstab 1
        option anon_mount 1

config global autoswap
        option from_fstab 1
        option anon_swap 0

config mount
        option target   /home
        option device   /dev/sda1
        option fstype   ext4
        option options  rw,sync
        option enabled  0
        option enabled_fsck 0

config swap
        option device   /dev/sda2         -> this is our 100mb swap that we already created
        option enabled  1                    -> enabled it


config mount

option device /dev/sda3             -> this is our ext2 formated usb that we already created
option target /mnt/usb                -> i mount it on /mnt/usb
option enabled_fsck 0            
option options rw,sync              -> mount with read and write + sync
option enabled 1                       -> enabled it
option is_rootfs 1                    -> to make extroots 

after that press esc, then :wq to save and rewrite fstab configuration.



now restart your tplink mr3020.... either by plug off power source or type reboot in the console.


login into console....

type df


it will show

rootfs                 6927587      8194   6561947   0% /
/dev/root                 2880      2824        56  98% /rom
tmpfs                    14580        80     14500   1% /tmp
tmpfs                      512         0       512   0% /dev
/dev/sda3              6927587      8194   6561947   0% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay     6927587      8194   6561947   0% /                 ->  before we edit fstab there isnt    there

the next step will  be

tar -C /overlay -cvf - . | tar -C /mnt/usb/ -xf -

to pivot whole /overlay to the usb storage which  already being mount from /dev/sda3 to /mnt/usb.

done. now all our further instalation will move on our storage...