Initial configuration

This is a tutorial to show you how to quickly set up a development STB using the HTTP boot protocol. It assumes you have a freshly installed Fedora linux distribution set up, and that you have already installed the KreaTV SDK into a directory referred to as <sdk_root>. If not, you will have to adapt some of the instructions to your existing setup. You will need to configure and start a DHCP server, and a HTTP server.

DHCP setup

The first step in booting the STB is to configure the DHCP server so that it supplies some extra vendor specific information to the STB. An example DHCP configuration file is provided in the SDK under <sdk_root>/examples/dhcp/sample_dhcpd.conf Let's copy this to the DHCP server directory, overwriting the default configuration file:

$ cd <sdk_root>/examples/dhcp
$ sudo cp sample-dhcpd.conf /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf
$ sudo vim /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf

The next step is to configure the basic network. Edit the following subnet section to use the appropriate IP range and netmask for your environment. If this subnet doesn't match the server IP-address then it's likely the DHCP server will fail to start...

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range                   192.168.0.100 192.168.0.250;
option routers          192.168.0.1;

You should now be able to start your DHCP server. Check the /var/log/messages file after starting it, as errors will be reported there:

$ sudo service dhcpd start

Add a host entry for the STB

Next, add a host declaration for your STB. Obviously in a production environment you don't want to add an entry for every STB, and the global options help with that, but for this lab setup it is often very useful to have a host definition which assigns your STB the same IP address and can easily override the global options:

# specific STBs
host my-stb {
  hardware ethernet 00:02:9b:3c:5c:60;
  fixed-address 192.168.0.63;
  option KreaTV.boot-loader-log "192.168.0.10:19997";
}

Now that the logging option has been added, restart the DHCP server and go to the section on receiving the boot loader log.

$ sudo service dhcpd restart

>> Now that the DHCP server is running, it is time to see what the STB is doing by accessing the boot loader log.