SNIPPET: OpenWRT on Netgear WGT346U Dumbass Help - Packages to install to use USB for storage devices 
Monday, August 22, 2011, 23:48 - How-Tos
This is a snippet to help me if I ever need to do this again.

I figure there are 3 sections to installing packages in OpenWRT on my WGT346U to make it support accessing my USB storage devices:
1. Basic USB Suppport
2. Kernel support
3. File System support

Basic Support can be found at the following page: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/usb.essentials
I had to install the following packages from this page:
- kmod-usb-core
- kmod-usb2
- usbutils
I found that I did not have to do any insmod commands. Everything loaded automatically. Also note that the WGT346U support USB2. On other routers it may be different and you may need to install USB 1.1 support for those.

Kernel support is found on the following page: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/usb.storage
The following packages from this page had to be installed:
- kmod-usb-storage
- block-mount
- block-hotplug
I installed block-mount and block-hotplug packages because I want my USB storage to mount automatically when attached.

File System Support is available from http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/usb.storage
Depending on the file system used on the device you are attaching, you may need to install different packages here. I installed:
- kmod-fs-etx4
- kmod-fs-vfat
As I want to access VFAT and EXT2 partitions.

In addition to this, the VFAT filesystem requires the following codepage/charset packages to mount:
- kmod-nls-cp437
- kmod-nls-iso8859-1
Both of these packages are required for the VFAT partition I have. You may need different packages depending on your configuration/location.

As a result, the following commands yield these outputs:
root@OpenWrt:/# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0781:5170 SanDisk Corp.
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation

root@OpenWrt:/# lsmod | grep usb
usb_storage 35680 2
usbcore 107040 5 usb_storage,uhci_hcd,ohci_hcd,ehci_hcd
scsi_mod 73008 2 usb_storage,sd_mod
nls_base 4960 5 nls_iso8859_1,nls_cp437,vfat,fat,usbcore

If when plugging in your USB device it is not finding the device as something like /dev/sda, you have most likely forgotten to install the kernel support, ie: kmod-usb-support

If you are plugging the device in and getting messages starting with VFAT: some error here you likely need to install come codepage or charset support package.

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