Vagrant for WD My Cloud

Vagrant setup for building packages for WD My Cloud running with firmware 4.x

Firmware 4.x broke compatibility with all existing Debian repositories so you can't simply apt-get install new packages anymore. The packages need to be rebuilt and this Vagrant setup provides an environment in which to do it relatively easily.

This sets up a Debian wheezy armhf qemu cowbuilder chroot in a x64 Debian wheezy VM so it should be usable on Mac and Windows. If you're already using Debian or a derivative like Ubuntu you might want to skip everything about Vagrant and just set up the cowbuilder environment yourself (see Vagrantfile)

1. setting up

This needs to be done only once.

1. Install VirtualBox (tested with 4.3.14)

2. Install Vagrant (tested with 1.6.3)

3. Download the package containing custom binutils from WD Downloads and extract the binutils packages into pbuilder-hooks/

   gpl-source-wd_my_cloud-04.04.01-112.zip (574MB) at the time of writing

curl -O http://download.wdc.com/gpl/gpl-source-wd_my_cloud-04.04.01-112.zip ./extract-binutils.sh gpl-source-wd_my_cloud-04.04.01-112.zip ```

4. Install and start up the virtual machine

   This is going to take some time as it'll download a Debian Linux distribution. Twice. You may want to edit the DEBIANMIRROR variable in Vagrantfile to point to a Debian mirror close to you in order to reduce the time it takes to download everything.

vagrant up ```

2. log in

vagrant up
vagrant ssh

3. build packages

These commands are run in the virtual machine after vagrant ssh

cd /vagrant/sources
apt-get source transmission
cd transmission-2.52
pdebuild

The built package(s) will be placed in result/ directory that will be created if it doesn't already exist.

4. install packages to WD My Cloud

scp results/transmission*.deb [email protected]:
ssh -l root wdmycloud.local
dpkg -i transmission_*.deb transmission-cli_*.deb transmission-common_*.deb transmission-daemon_*.deb

Notes

The build environment is simply set to replace binutils with the custom binutils with 64k pages that is required to build packages that are compatible with the 4.x firmware. Mostly it's just an ordinary cowbuilder chroot.

cowbuilder is just for quicker(?) builds, could probably just as well use pbuilder

While qemu-debootstrap makes it possible to build the packages for the armhf architecture fairly easily, qemu isn't sufficient for running tests (e.g. curl) successfully which is why tests are disabled with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck

Building dependencies and using those packages to (re-)build other packages is not automated. You'll need to manually generate the Packages file for the built packages (cd /vagrant/results && apt-ftparchive packages . | gzip > Packages.gz) and within the cowbuilder chroot add the /vagrant/results/ directory to apt sources.list and run apt-get update.