I’ve got myself a dreamplug. It arrived a few days ago. I didn’t have time to do anything to it, I just booted up, saw it got the IP, connected to it and shut it down.
My brother-in-law also got one, and his arrived a few weeks earlier so he had time to mess with it. And from messing around directly with the setting files in stead of making changes only to the live system so they won’t survive a reboot, he managed to get his dreamplug in a non-connectable state.
And of course, none of us bought a JTAG. I know why I didn’t, because my plans were top make sure my management interface is always ok.
So he came by today so that I can fiddle around and fix it for him.
I have a USB BGA card, which I am using on my ESXi until I will manage to somehow passthrough a PCIe VGA card. So I figured I would plug that in, with a USB keyboard and maybe get some video.
Wrong. No video.
The SD card also doesn’t boot my default.
So, as I remember reading it has everything on an internal microsd card, I took the plug apart.
It’s really not complicated at all. You unscrew 4 screws and then the sd card is there, very accessible locked in place with what looks like a GSM bracket (I only saw this type on some GSM phones, but I’m sure its used in many places).
So I put the card into a usb reader, connected it to a virtual machine running linux, mounted it and fixed the config files.
And while I was at it, made a backup of the SD card too (disk copy, to preserve boot sector).
So…. why in the world would anybody buy a JTAG?
Granted, it is easier to work with that, but then again, this device is not exactly for the common user either.
