Mounting NFS Shares on a Wanadoo Livebox (Inventel DV4210) Wireless ADSL Modem Router


The Wanadoo branded Inventel Livebox has a very limited amount of memory available to be used for storage of extra programs and/or logs. However, we should be able to connect to NFS shares and use them for extra storage. I have managed to do this and the method used is shown below.

  • If required, use a modified cfgsave.dwb file to allow access to a command prompt.
  • Build and install a serial port adapter. A schematic for the adapter is available here. No opening of the box required.
  • On the version of the firmware that I am currently using (v5.02.2-uk) there is enough space available on the ffs partition to allow me to copy the following files to /etc. This means that they should survive a reboot. If your version of firmware does not have the space on the ffs you can copy them to /var but you will need to recopy them if the Livebox is rebooted. If you also install the files for using USB storage, I do not think you will have enough space on the ffs partition (/etc directory) and the ramdrive (/var directory). One of these groups of files might need to be stored on the other storage medium.
  • Change directory to the directory of your choice.
  • Using wget or ftp, copy sunrpc.o,, lockd.o and nfs.o to the directory of your choice.
  • You now need to load the drivers in order.
  • Ensure that you are in the directory of your choice.
  • You should now be able to mount any available NFS shares. Command for mounting is 'mount -t nfs -o nolock ip:/nfsshare mount_point' where ip:/nfshshare is the IP Address and share path/name of the exported NFS share and the mount_point can be /mnt/nfs/nfsa, /mnt/nfs/nfsb, etc. The '-o nolock' stops you from getting a very long delay from the mount command, although eventually the mount will succeed. Typing 'df' should now show the amount of free disk space on all mounted partitions and should include those of the NFS connected share. Once you have finished using the shared device, you should be able to remove all the drivers you have loaded with 'rmmod modulename' for each module in reverse order.
  • See mounts and modules for screendumps.
  • If you wanted to, you could create a script file in /etc/init.d and have it called during the boot process to automatically install the drivers and mount the partitions. This would obviously depend on where you managed to copy the module files to.
  • All the files that you need to copy to the Livebox were compiled using this source code, provided by Belkin for their F5D7633 ADSL Modem/Router which uses the same Broadcom device. I just changed the config file to build the USB/SCSI/NFS modules and then did a 'make PROFILE=96348GW' and copied the files I wanted from targets/96348GW/modules/lib.... except for nls.o which came from the sgibcm_2_4_17/linux/fs/nfs directory. I have just verified that this config file builds the required modules and that they load and function correctly. The config file needs to be copied as .config into the sgibcm_2_4_17/linux directory. You also need to change the Makefile in that directory to add -mlong-calls to line 105 in the CFLAGS. If you don't, doing insmod with nls.o results in an error. To compile the code, change to the root of the source and type 'make PROFILE=96348GW'. You also need the cross-compile toolset. The version I use came from uclibc-crosstools-mips-0.9.12-5p1.i386.rpm which was part of the bcm963xx_2.14L.02DT_consumer_release.tar.gz code released by Sinus 1054/ HHT (Sinus 1054)/ Siemens SE515. All these sources appear to be identical. I obtained mine from within the Siemens source code but the Sinus one is probably easier to download.
    • Andy Potter.