Vera extroot

No you are indeed no longer extrooted. Did you accidentally upgrade firmware by any chance?

No, no firmware updates but I had a bunch of power failures at the house and I am guessing at some point the harddrive stopped mounting or something. This actually works out. I will just leave as is and install the new firmware when it is out of Beta (I was planning to remove exroot at that time anyway).

Your other thread with all the drive info was removed from the forums. (The thread with savespace scripts), that thread was handy because it also listed all the files/directories that are safe to remove. Can you re-repost the the list of folders that are OK to clean out if you are having space issues? Hopefully I can keep the Vera up and running until the new firmware is finalized.

Hmm didn’t know that more of my posts were removed. I did not even see any notifications for edits. Oh well. I am not going to repost things the management here doesn’t want to see. You can PM me and ask specific questions maybe…

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@rafale77, for those of us that didn’t heed the warning and did an upgrade to 7.30… can we restore to 7.29, exroot again, and then try to upgrade or are we SoL?

I don’t know how to downgrade the kernel unfortunately. I suspect, I could trick the vera into doing it but the way I did mine was to run this:

and then upgrade back to 7.29 before manually running the scripts to upgrade to 7.30 or 7.31 by maintaining the kernel. It’s unfortunate that I am treating 7.30 and 7.31 upgraded units as if they were bricked… :sweat_smile:
I wish I knew how to re-enable the root pivoting on the new kernel… Sorry. My interest is also waning fast as I am migrating away from vera so I won’t spend too much time on it. I get the feeling over the last few firmware versions that eZLO is gradually closing down the platform. Whether it is intentional or not, It is increasingly difficult to maintain the system extrooted which is a far better solution than all the kernel and storage tweaks the devs are making albeit requiring additional hardware…

I hear you and that is unfortunately the way i am leaning as well. As far as a new platform, are you moving everything over to HA or what are you going to be using? just trying to follow the best path possible moving forward.

Replied to you in another more appropriate thread.

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I found the problem preventing the new firmwares from extrooting and fixed it. I managed to validate it on both the vera edge and the vera plus. There is no need to remain on the old firmwares anymore. I will send out scripts tomorrow after I am done testing them.

This is what I am getting as I found a workaround to reproduce the behavior of extroot on the updated kernels:

root@MiOS_5001XXXX:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs                  234.1G    168.7M    222.0G   0% /
/dev/root                 8.0M      8.0M         0 100% /rom/rom
tmpfs                   124.3M      1.2M    123.2M   1% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock7           10.6M      1.1M      9.5M  11% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay       10.6M      1.1M      9.5M  11% /rom
tmpfs                   512.0K         0    512.0K   0% /dev
/dev/sda1               493.6M      1.2M    456.1M   0% /rom/mnt/sda1
/dev/mtdblock10          50.0M     22.5M     27.5M  45% /rom/storage
/dev/mtdblock10          50.0M     22.5M     27.5M  45% /rom/etc/cmh-firmware
/dev/mtdblock10          50.0M     22.5M     27.5M  45% /rom/etc/cmh-backup
/dev/mtdblock9            9.8M      9.8M         0 100% /rom/mios
/dev/mtdblock10          50.0M     22.5M     27.5M  45% /rom/etc/cmh-ludl
/dev/mtdblock11          19.3M      1.0M     18.2M   5% /rom/ezmi
/dev/mtdblock11          19.3M      1.0M     18.2M   5% /rom/etc/cmh
/dev/mtdblock6            8.0M      8.0M         0 100% /rom/mnt/mtdblock6

So as you can see I managed to pivot the root but from the startup logs, I had to make this happen much later in the boot process. It means from what I observed that the luup engine reloads twice during the boot process. I verified that adding plugins actually load and work on the external drive. I used the same trick I used on the previous vera edge script which should still work. The original partitions (so many of them now with this new kernel as data has been distributed all over) are now mounted as read only in the “rom” folder and you shouldn’t need to touch them.

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Utterly awesome

C

And there you go. Confirmed on my second vera:

root@MiOS_5000XXXX:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs                   58.1G    175.8M     54.9G   0% /
/dev/root                 8.0M      8.0M         0 100% /rom/rom
tmpfs                   124.3M    304.0K    124.0M   0% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock7           10.6M      1.2M      9.4M  11% /rom/overlay
overlayfs:/overlay       10.6M      1.2M      9.4M  11% /rom
tmpfs                   512.0K         0    512.0K   0% /dev
/dev/sda1               487.8M      6.4M    451.8M   1% /tmp/log/cmh
/dev/mtdblock10          50.0M     13.8M     36.2M  28% /rom/storage
/dev/mtdblock10          50.0M     13.8M     36.2M  28% /rom/etc/cmh-firmware
/dev/mtdblock10          50.0M     13.8M     36.2M  28% /rom/etc/cmh-backup
/dev/mtdblock9            9.8M      9.8M         0 100% /rom/mios
/dev/mtdblock10          50.0M     13.8M     36.2M  28% /rom/etc/cmh-ludl
/dev/mtdblock11          19.3M      1.0M     18.2M   5% /rom/ezmi
/dev/mtdblock11          19.3M      1.0M     18.2M   5% /rom/etc/cmh
/dev/mtdblock6            8.0M      8.0M         0 100% /rom/mnt/mtdblock6
/dev/sda2                58.1G    175.8M     54.9G   0% /

Please find the scripts attached.

extrootplus.sh.zip (1.1 KB)extrootedge.sh.zip (1.3 KB)

Thanks @rafale77. What’s the process here if you’re already exrooted on 7.29?

Cheers

C

Awesome! :+1:
Is it possible to extroot a Vera Secure, running the latest firmware with the VP-script?

The process would

  1. Backup (Did I need to mention that?)
  2. Unplug the SSD and reboot
  3. Upgrade to 7.31 with factory reset
  4. Load the script for your unit and… extroot
  5. After the unit reboots out of the extroot, verify that it was successful with the df -h command output above
  6. Restore from backup.

@Fanan, Unfortunately I cannot guarantee it will work on the secure because I don’t have one to test on… I would presume it would mostly work but I would not be surprised if it needed something else. One way to find out would be for you to upgrade and send me the output of the df -h command.

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I tried with my Vera Secure with the latest firmware - and kaboom - it worked!
Thank you @rafale77!

image

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Not sure I dare :slight_smile:
C

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nice ill give it a go soon

From here thereon I will be posting the extroot scripts on github:

Will also be editing the first post to add this.

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I’ve previously upgraded to 1.7.4833 (7.30) using your (earlier) script, I guess the one that didn’t upgrade the kernel.

So are all these steps required (especially the unplugging of SSD part), or would it be enough to do Vera firmware upgrade and run the new script? Also, are all these steps required in every (future) upgrade going forward?

It is better to do this:

  1. backup
  2. remove ssd and reboot
  3. upgrade to 7.31 (with factory reset option)
  4. extroot with the new script
  5. restore your backup

Want to make sure that you are not upgrading the ssd but the vera’s internal drive.

I updated my Vera Secure (that was extrooted) with the ssd connected. After the update I had to run the script once again. That worked just fine. Back on track. So in my case the connected ssd didn’t cause any problems.
Since I extrooted my Vera, it seem to be much more reliable, faster and almost without glitches (which was common before the extroot). So I’m very greatful for all the support you @rafale77 and @rigpapa has provided us. Without the two of you, I and a lot more people would be long gone by now. So I just want to thank you both for staying, putting in the time and energy without being on Veras payroll. That’s just phenomenal! Have a great day! Over and out. /Fanan

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