Scouring eBay late at night rarely leads to good decisions, but sometimes you hit gold. I managed to snag a rare “486-JA” i486DX motherboard with 8MB RAM, shipped all the way from Ukraine. These boards have become almost impossible to find outside the usual recycled junk, and, apparently, the last surviving examples now come with warzone shipping rates attached (joke).

I “accidentally” won an eBay auction for five single board computers, four of which are Raspbery pi’s. By accidentally k mean I bid on an auction and didn’t expect to win. Lo and behold, colour me surprised when I get a notification I now had to pay for my order.
 

I stumbled upon another series of single board computers capable of running Linux online, the Milk V Duo S. These boards are interesting because they have both an ARM and a RISC V processor.

At first look, the idea of having two CPUs in one board is appealing. The possibility of dedicating one core to real‑time tasks while the other handles a full Linux stack seems like the ultimate design. As I dug into the documentation, it turns out that the board uses a simple switch to choose which core boots. In other words, you can boot either the ARM side or the RISC‑V side, but not run both concurrently. The board in conjunction runs FreeRTOS.

I have a habit of diving headfirst into projects that are fun but maybe not super useful. A project I worked on a few months ago  MuStack MicroVM (msmv) —a project that took far more effort than necessary to create something that, in all honesty, I’ll probably never use again. But hey, at least it works, right?

So, What Exactly is msmv?

At its core, MuStack MicroVM is a minimalistic Linux virtual machine build system. Think Docker, but without all the convenience and with way more manual labour involved. It's designed to create lightweight, secure, and isolated virtual machines for testing environments. Perfect if you're someone who enjoys the thrill of complexity, like building a ship in a bottle—but digitally. Plus, I'm a sucker for naming projects with an acronym.

After bricking the last wifi repeater in my last post, I was determined not do that again. At least not intentionally.

This time around, I purchased the same model as before (U13) as well as three more units of a different model, for $10 and $7 CAD respectively. The goal here is to get root access via SSH/telnet and use these devices as general purpose Linux single board computers. With an ethernet port, built in power supply and wifi, these boards are great for single-purpose servers.

New hardware

I have a fixation of buying little electronic trinkets and gadgets on foreign websites for cheap prices. Something about the cost of such little things, and that it takes 3-4 weeks to arrive to my door, provides me with excitement when I visit the post office to pick up my parcels. Lately, I purchased some ESP32 and ESP8266 boards for around $3, and various other programmers and jumper cables for around the same price point. It makes experimenting with a new project fun and inexpensive (great if you like to drop projects after a month too).

In the hot summer we're having out here, I like to sit in my yard and read online tech news and blogs on my phone. Being the hedonistic person I am, I cannot wait 3-4 seconds for a page to load. The wifi coverage at my house is sufficient in doors, but when I go 150 yards away, it can be abysmal. 

I enjoy building small, self-contained software for the pure joy of simplifying what you build. Building complex software is easy; small and maintainable software is not (not always anyway).
To take that same vein of thought, I have been working on a floppy-sized Linux distro (fluxflop) for the pure fun of how small I can build the Linux kernel, while keeping it usable. Running make tinyconfig is easy enough, but how small can you truly make the kernel? 

Quick update to SnackLinux, rolled out Linux 4.15.2 with Busybox 1.28.0. Also switched over to x86_64 only (for now at least) since it simplifies a lot of things. I removed the need to staticly link everything and get rid of that niche, since a few other smaller distros cover that (Alpine Linux for example). Again, this simplifies building packages and running into less issues. Check it out on Github for build instructions, or the getting started page on getting SnackLinux running.

Edit: This has been fixed in the latest firmare update 4.5.10.25

The routers that you receive from your ISP are almost always garbage: not many options to configure and pitiful wifi range. The router/modem that Shaw customers receive is the Hitron CGNM-2250 thankfully isn't completely terrible, 802.11ac plus gigabit ports. I was poking about and researching the model and came upon an exploit for a similar model version for remote code execution. The CGNM-2250 is vulnerable as well, for reference my software version is 4.5.8.20 with hardware version 1A. The input for the ping utility through the web interface isn't sanitized so you can enter arbitrary input. I discovered that it has a few basic utilities, including Dropbear.

SnackLinux now has a whopping 31 packages, which include a (somewhat) working gcc toolchain and other fun GNU utilities (vitetris included!). I was able to add Docker support as well, which is just tarballed userland. Getting a working gcc toolchain was a bit of a pain in the butt. Pain in the butt because musl doesn't play nice with every piece of software out there, since most (that I have encountered anyway) think we're using glibc. And since SnackLinux is focused on every packaging being staticly compiled, not every package plays nice with that either. For example, there is a Python 2.7.9 package in the repository that is missing quite a few modules, see below: