When working on new projects or hacks, sometimes you just have to stop, think and start writing down your processes and discoveries. While working on bootstrapping the DLink DIR-825C1, I realized that I had accumulated a lot of new (to me) knowledge from the FreeBSD Community (namely, Adrian Chadd and Warner Losh).

There is a less than clear way of constructing images for these embedded devices that has an analogue in the Linux community under the OpenWRT project. Many of the processes are the same, but enough are different that I thought it wise to write down some of the processes into the beginning of a hacker’s guide to doing stuff and/or things in this space.

The first document I came up with was based on the idea that we can netboot these little devices without touching the on-board flash device. This is what you should use to get the machine bootstrapped and figure out where all the calibration data for the wireless adapters exist. This is crucial to not destroying your device. The wireless calibration data (ART) is unique to each device, destroying it will mean you have to RMA this device.

The second document I’ve created is a description of how to construct the flash device hints entries in the kernel hints file for FreeBSD. I found the kernel hints file to be cumbersome in comparison to the linux kernel way of using device specific C files for unique characteristics.

Its interesting stuff if you have the hankering to dig a bit deeper into systems that aren’t PC class machines.