Technical data

2. Setup and Conﬁguration

Before you try the more advanced installation procedures you should make yourself comfort-

able with ﬂi4l by setting up a minimal version. If you want to use your ﬂi4l as an answering

machine or a HTTP-proxy later on, you already feel conﬁdent and have the experience of

setting up a basic running system.

That said, four variants of installations are possible:

USB-Stick Router on an USB stick

CD-router Router on a CD

Netzwerk Network boot

HD-Installation Typ A Router on a hard disk, CF, DoC – only one FAT-Partition

HD-Installation Typ B Router on a hard disk, CF, DoC – one FAT- and one ext3-Partition

2.3.1. Router on a USB-Stick

USB-Sticks are addressed as harddisks by Linux hence the same explanations as for the hard-

disk installation are valid here. Please note that the according drivers for the USB port have

to be loaded via OPT_USB in order to access the stick with OPT_HDINSTALL.

2.3.2. Router on a CD, or network boot

All necessary ﬁles are on the boot medium and are extracted to a dynamically sized RAM disk

while booting. Using a minimalistic conﬁguration, it is possible to run the router with only 64

MiB of RAM. The maximum setup is only limited by the capacity of the boot medium and

available RAM.

2.3.3. Type A: Router on hard disk—only one FAT partition

This corresponds to the CD version, with the only diﬀerence of the ﬁles residing on a hard

disk instead, the term “hard disk” also enclosing Compact Flash from 8 MiB upwards and

other devices which are accessed like hard disks under Linux. As of ﬂi4l 2.1.4, you can also

use DiskOnChip Flash memory from M-Sys or SCSI hard disks.

The limit for the archive opt.img is removed by disk capacity, but all these ﬁles have to be

installed into a RAM disk of suitable size during the boot process. This increases the necessary

amount of RAM if you use many software packages.

In order to update software packages (i.e. the archive opt.img and the conﬁguration rc.cfg

over the network), the FAT partition has to provide enough space for the kernel, the RootFS

and TWICE the size of the opt.img archive! If you also want to enable the recovery option,

the required space is increased one more time by the size of the opt.img archive.

2.3.4. Type B: Router on hard disk—one FAT and one ext3 partition

In contrast to type A, most of the ﬁles are not put into the RAM disk. Instead, they are

copied from the opt.img archive to the ext3 partition on the hard disk at the very ﬁrst start

after the initial installation or an update. On successive reboots they are loaded from the ext3

partition. Using this type of installation, the amount of RAM needed for running the router