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Having some form of permanent storage made available to Tomato is highly recommended. USB is an excellent candidate for this, and can provide a swap partition to prevent issues.<Fix ME!> What issues?
Assuming you are using either an ARM build or a MIPS build with USB support, it is assumed you have already have USB support enabled.
For this example I'm using a 16GB USB 3.0 USB flash drive which is seen in the system as sda.
This assumes your drive device device name is sda ! If it's not, make sure to change the following commands consistent with your drive's device name.
The echo 1000M statement below defines the size of the swap partition (in MB). You may want to adjust that, according to your needs.
Then enter:
device=/dev/sda partition=$device'1' nvram set usb_automount="0" (echo o; echo n; echo p; echo 2; echo ; echo 1000M; echo t; echo 82; echo n; echo p; echo 1; echo ; echo ; echo w) | fdisk $device mkfs.ext2 -L USB $partion mkswap /dev/sda2 swapon /dev/sda2 mkdir /mnt/sda1 && mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 nvram set usb_automount="1"
From the Web GUI: Disable the Automount checkbox in the USB and NAS/USB Support menu.
Via SSH: delete any exsisting partitions:
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>fdisk /dev/sda</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>o</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>At this point your USB flash drive is unpartitioned. Now let's create the necessary partition table:</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>n</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>p</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>2</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>ENTER (default)</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>1000M (Essentially 1 GB out for swap)</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>t</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>82</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>n</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>p
ENTER (default)</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>ENTER (default)</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>l (to verify)</font>
<font inherit/Courier New,Courier,monospace;;inherit;;inherit>w (to save and exit fdisk)</font>
At this point you should have two unformatted partitions on your USB flash drive:
sda1 ~14GB (fs-type ext2/3/4)
sda2 ~1GB (fs-type swap)
Now, let's format the partitions. NOTE: it is suggested you use <font inherit/inherit;;#c0392b;;inherit>ext2</font> for USB flash drives and ext3 for hard disks.
mkfs.ext2 -L USB /dev/sda1 mkswap /dev/sda2
Now, mount the partitions:
swapon /dev/sda2 mkdir /mnt/sda1 && mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
You can now re-enable USB Automount on the USB and NAS menu.