Hi there,

 

I was pretty disappointed to find out that the TL-R470T+ recently purchased comes with firmware that removed any remote access (telnet/ssh) into the router!!  From reading online (before purchase) and even looking in the (older) documentation it showed telnet as a possibility..

 

In addition their router only provides for PAID ddns services, and not any of the free ones :)  that's a bit annoying, given that openwrt has a module with all the providers already...

 

Anyways, one thing leads to another, and it is mentioned that the router uses OpenWRT and GPL source code is provided by TP-Link:

 

https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/download/tl-r470t%252b/#GPL-Code

 

Searching online, did not find anyone else who rebuilt successfully, one post mentioned the code is non-usable, that got me curious!!  So, here are my attempts, download that tar.bz2:

 

1e8252cf441c4456cd12fdb066d75759  TL-R470T-plus6.0_GPL.tar.bz2

 

untar, run make menuconfig (as the README suggests), fails with:

 

1)

     scripts/config/mconf: 1: scripts/config/mconf: Syntax error: “(” unexpected

 

Searching online, found Japanese website, with similar error:
      https://www.bbsmax.com/A/Gkz1QPojzR/          

 

Suggestion was: cd scripts/config
              make clean & make

 

That WORKED, menuconfig appeared, I selected the TL-R470T config, and SAVED as .config

 

2) Running make failed with:

 

       autoreconf: running: /home/stormy/dev_router_series_r470_gpl/dev_router_series/staging_dir/host/bin/automake --add-missing
        Unescaped left brace in regex is illegal here in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/\${ <-- HERE ([^ \t=:+{}]+)}/ at /home/stormy/dev_router_series_r470_gpl/dev_router_series/staging_dir/host/bin/automake line 4160.

 

   Searching found similar error (interaction of perl & automake:      https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/issues/470         

 

       Solution is to escape the curley braces {} as below:
          Orig: $text =~ s/\${([^ \t=:+{}]+)}/&substitute_ac_subst_variables_worker ($1)/ge;
           Fix: $text =~ s/\$\{([^ \t=:+\{\}]+)\}/&substitute_ac_subst_variables_worker ($1)/ge;

 

3) Next the "make" continues for a while, and fails when trying to download kernel sources for 3.10.14, with many URLs, here is just one failure:

 

 "@KERNEL/linux/kernel/v3.x"
--2019-12-24 20:01:50--  ftp://ftp.all.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/linux-3.10.14.tar.xz
           => '-'
Resolving ftp.all.kernel.org (ftp.all.kernel.org)... failed: Name or service not known.
wget: unable to resolve host address 'ftp.all.kernel.org'

 

basically, the download.pl script has bunch of hardcoded locations, all of which are not valid, or the file missing.

 

For example: http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources, as well as the ftp.all.kernel.org, and others too.

 

Thinking, oh, maybe this generic place will do: https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/

 

Edited download.pl, and changed to that path, then make failed to apply patches to Kconfig as follows:

 

 

Applying /home/stormy/dev_router_series_r470_gpl/dev_router_series/target/linux/generic/patches-3.10.14/400-mtd-patches.patch using plaintext:
patching file drivers/mtd/chips/cfi_cmdset_0002.c
patching file drivers/mtd/Kconfig
Hunk #1 FAILED at 15.
Hunk #2 succeeded at 154 (offset -60 lines).
1 out of 2 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file drivers/mtd/Kconfig.rej
patching file drivers/mtd/Makefile
Hunk #1 succeeded at 13 (offset -8 lines).
patching file drivers/mtd/mtdpart.c
Hunk #1 FAILED at 29.
Hunk #2 FAILED at 52.
Hunk #3 FAILED at 239.
Hunk #4 FAILED at 259.
Hunk #5 FAILED at 282.
Hunk #6 FAILED at 290.
Hunk #7 FAILED at 303.
Hunk #8 FAILED at 323.
Hunk #9 FAILED at 342.
Hunk #10 FAILED at 350.
Hunk #11 FAILED at 522.
Hunk #12 FAILED at 599.
Hunk #13 FAILED at 621.
Hunk #14 FAILED at 657.
Hunk #15 FAILED at 724.
Hunk #16 FAILED at 806.
Hunk #17 FAILED at 849.
Hunk #18 FAILED at 869.
Hunk #19 FAILED at 895.
Hunk #20 FAILED at 909.
Hunk #21 FAILED at 962.
Hunk #22 FAILED at 993.
Hunk #23 FAILED at 1024.
Hunk #24 FAILED at 1048.
Hunk #25 FAILED at 1126.
Hunk #26 FAILED at 1158.
Hunk #27 FAILED at 1177.
Hunk #28 FAILED at 1195.
28 out of 28 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file drivers/mtd/mtdpart.c.rej
patching file drivers/mtd/nand/nand_ecc.c
patching file drivers/mtd/nand/plat_nand.c
patching file drivers/mtd/redboot.c
patching file include/linux/mtd/mtd.h
Hunk #1 FAILED at 59.
Hunk #2 FAILED at 337.
Hunk #3 FAILED at 355.
3 out of 3 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file include/linux/mtd/mtd.h.rej
patching file include/linux/mtd/nand.h
Hunk #1 FAILED at 659.
1 out of 1 hunk FAILED -- saving rejects to file include/linux/mtd/nand.h.rej
patching file include/linux/mtd/partitions.h
Hunk #3 FAILED at 68.
Hunk #4 FAILED at 82.
Hunk #5 FAILED at 94.
Hunk #6 FAILED at 108.
4 out of 6 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file include/linux/mtd/partitions.h.rej
Patch failed!  Please fix /home/stormy/dev_router_series_r470_gpl/dev_router_series/target/linux/generic/patches-3.10.14/400-mtd-patches.patch!

 

Looking around, nothing obvious, so then thought, oh, wait, maybe they need the linux sources from another/better place :) tried:

 

https://www.linux-mips.org/pub/linux/mips/kernel/v3.x/linux-3.10.14.tar.xz

 

rm -f dl/linux-3.10.14.tar.xz ; make

 

it pulled the kernel tree from other location, now the patching failed at a much earlier place:

 

Applying /home/stormy/dev_router_series_r470_gpl/dev_router_series/target/linux/generic/patches-3.10.14/1001-8021q_vlan_support_untag.patch using plaintext:
patching file include/uapi/linux/if_vlan.h
patching file net/8021q/vlan.c
Hunk #1 succeeded at 501 (offset -2 lines).
Hunk #2 succeeded at 588 (offset -2 lines).
patching file net/8021q/vlan_dev.c
patching file net/8021q/vlan.h
patching file net/8021q/vlanproc.c
Hunk #1 succeeded at 285 (offset -6 lines).

Applying /home/stormy/dev_router_series_r470_gpl/dev_router_series/target/linux/generic/patches-3.10.14/130-mips_remove_plat_dma_functions.patch using plaintext:
patching file arch/mips/include/asm/mach-cavium-octeon/dma-coherence.h
Hunk #1 FAILED at 46.
1 out of 1 hunk FAILED -- saving rejects to file arch/mips/include/asm/mach-cavium-octeon/dma-coherence.h.rej
patching file arch/mips/include/asm/mach-generic/dma-coherence.h
patching file arch/mips/include/asm/mach-ip27/dma-coherence.h
patching file arch/mips/include/asm/mach-ip32/dma-coherence.h
patching file arch/mips/include/asm/mach-jazz/dma-coherence.h
patching file arch/mips/include/asm/mach-loongson/dma-coherence.h
patching file arch/mips/include/asm/mach-powertv/dma-coherence.h
patching file arch/mips/mm/dma-default.c
Hunk #1 succeeded at 289 (offset -4 lines).
Hunk #2 succeeded at 322 (offset -4 lines).
Hunk #3 succeeded at 335 (offset -4 lines).
Patch failed!  Please fix /home/stormy/dev_router_series_r470_gpl/dev_router_series/target/linux/generic/patches-3.10.14/130-mips_remove_plat_dma_functions.patch!

 

Searched on openwrt.org, closest i could find is: https://sources.openwrt.org/linux-3.10.58.tar.xz, not sure how to switch to it, in .config found:

 

CONFIG_LINUX_3_10=y

 

but not sure that's relevant/useful..

 

Found in target/linux/mtk/Makefile:

 

LINUX_VERSION:=3.10.14
KERNEL_PATCHVER=3.10.14

 

One can try to change that, to pickup that 3.10.58 kernel from openwrt.org, however, that sould divert a bit too much from the path...

 

 

Long story short, question to all, specifically TP-Link, can you please lend a hand and help getting the GPL bits to compile to the firmware that got build from 2018 for v6?

 

This is not a "demand", this is a nice request, if one provides GPL source code, it would be nice if it actually worked... I definitely realize that things shift/change on the internet, that's understandable, so, here, lets fix that, pls someone find out which kernel to use in this case ?

 

Thanks.

 

Stormy.