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Messages - mikeprotts
1
I'd pinched another image (not mine) - I'll take a picture or two and upload these in the next couple of days.
I'm not used to very small scale soldering, apart from reattaching an LED display to an old calculator, and adding USB cable to an xbox memory card (xbox now runs Linus). I have a variable voltage iron that helps. I have soldered a number of small cables to circuit boards in the past - simple single core (stiff) wires are easiest, and if well tinned seem to attach ok first or second go. I had a lot of trouble getting the jumper pins to attach, the solder blocking the holes seems to need a high tempature, and with a small component (maybe a resistor) near by I didn't want to overheat. As the box was free to me, I'm probably less cautious than I might be, but I decided the fine soldering will have to wait until I have plenty of time. I'll also probably experiement a bit with some single core wires (from a cat 5 cable) and multi strand (from the serial header) before I decide which to use on the board.
Cheers
Mike
2
Made a start (notes in wiki) - tried to solder up the jumper pins where they seemed to fit (1302, 1304) - seems to have not broken anything, so I'll go for the harded blobs later.
I have an old serial and an old parallel header cable handy, so I may use these for connecting (I've also got the gender benders) as these should be reliable. The serial connection would be straighforward, so I'll probably solder direct, but the parallel (jtag) would be likely to be trickier so I will probably pull the connectors of an old IDE board and solder (short) wires from the board to these, so I can swap them round if I need to. The old parallel header will fit well on these.
Cheers
Mike
3
P.S. It's not a clear for me how I can grab the NK.BIN from the x300t hard drive and upoad it back to device
you've to hook up the drive to your computer. Also you can you an (USB)case ...so thats an easy way 
After you hooked it to your PC, you can access the drive like any other (e.g. usb-stick).
So to make this simple (for people like me who are stll working out the jtag part):
1) Take disk out and copy new files, then put back.
2) Solder jtag connector (the stage I am at)
3) Start jtag on PC (Windows or Linux etc)
4) turn on box and interupt boot (Not sure how)
5) Turn of signature check
6) allow boot to continue with software from hard disk.
Is this correct - I'm not entirely sure.
Cheers
Mike
4
From DiscoverBootstrap...
num5 := ((reader.ReadByte shl 8) or reader.ReadByte);
message := New(array[num5] of Byte);
message := reader.ReadBytes(num5);
num6 := ((reader.ReadByte shl 8) or reader.ReadByte);
signature := New(array[num6] of Byte);
signature := reader.ReadBytes(num6);
num7 := ((reader.ReadByte shl 8) or reader.ReadByte);
chain := New(array[num7] of Byte);
chain := reader.ReadBytes(num7);
I'll see how this breaks down the file.
Cheers
Mike
5
in theory it might be possible to use other certificates, but I think the root certificate is also stored in the cpu itself.
I'm not entirely sure. The host name makes sense, but why have a certificate in this file is there is already even a minimal cert chain available - or is this simple a signature? If the root cert is in rom then it will expire at some stage. It may be that there is some non or semi volatile storage under the white gunk (I need to put some pictures on the wiki) that holds this. If I can work out the bootstrap format I'll have a go and see what I get.
Cheers
Mike
6
I'm trying to identify what sort of file bootstrap is. It looks like a root CA cert in some format, and if I can work out how I will try to create my own certificate with my own root CA. The I'll see if the box gets as far if I create the signatures.
Cheers
Mike
7
Has anyone reviewed the software available from mips.com. There seems to be a huge amount at ftp.mips.com (public ftp server) and some more at
www.mips.com (which requires registration).
I'm looking through this to see if any is any use, and of course making sure it's free (as in speech) to use. A lot seems to be under GPL anyway. If I find any that seems to save a lot of work I will post here.
Cheers
Mike
8
I only see USB as an option. actually I want to avoid to have a harddrive in the x300t... there is no need for it anyway.
it only generates noise and heat. a USB stick would be a good alternative way to boot the x300t without network resources.
The BT vision boxes come with a nice 160GB drive, but I would prefer to make a silent machine - ideally I would use this to broadcast on my local network. I can see it may be useful as a file or web server for other people though. It still makes sense if possible to have the machine working from flash, with usb or hard disk for the additional storage.
I hope that using English doesn't cause problems for the German speakers here, I don't mind working from the German, but I'd prefer to post in English as my only option would be to use computer translation at the moment (I've just found an old German course and I'll have a go at learning a bit).
Cheers
Mike
9
Google translation of last sentence:
So in order to boot from usb should be a delay in rootfs plus subsequent mounting usb installed .. But it should also work.
Just thinking of possibilites here (and hoping google has translated adequately). I can only answer in English, but hope that I can help a bit.
Do we need the root partition to be on the USB stick? Would it be sufficient to mount /usr, /var etc. from USB?
Also it may be worth looking at how some of the live distros manage a USB boot, I assume they have some work around. Maybe unionfs would also be an option, so the initial root partition from flash would be supplemented by an addition of a file from the USB drive rather than the full partition?
Cheers
Mike
10
From the wiki it looks as though jtag is needed. There seem to be candidate solder points - I plan to hook up some wires to check. Then I'll have to look at making a jtag cable, the instructions seem to be around, but the wiggler seems to be the better option if I can find a suitable chip.
Cheers
Mike
11
I'm not sure if recording will work as it seems to rely on the server providing information. It would be interesting to see the traffic - even if the content is encrypted there may be clues from the headers.
Cheers
Mike
12
Turned out that my external USB caddy & motherboard both didn't like the disk, but another USB caddy did - it's not locked after all (and if I can't use this in the BT-Vision box I will upgrade my xbox disk - that's already runnign linux).
Cheers
Mike
13
Can you get both boxes to record and/or playback from broadcast TV?
Cheers
Mike
14
Couldn't get DRA to complete, constantly get BE01 so manually created 125Mb FAT partition and copied the original contents, incl BOOT.PRF so it was able to do a Normal start, which only gets as far as posting bootstrap.asmx (auth ticket request)
I can't get mine to go past dra, although the files are on the disk, so maybe there's something not quite right with how we think this works. I'll have another look at the process. In fact the files on the disk are probably out of date. Still need to investigate further.
Cheers
Mike
15
Hi Mike,
Where do you see the debug error? is this shown on screen? My HDMI/monitor goes blank after startup but the box proceeds to post the /bootstrap/Bootstrap.asmx, part of which is the x-tv2-auth-ticketReq. The box then expects a response containing x-tv2-auth-ticketResp.
This may be the point you are at.
It's on the screen (scart output). I'm not seeing any network traffic at this stage.
Cheers
Mike
