Getting Git repo onto BusyBox system (StarDot NetCam SC)

Question

The StarDot NetCam SC comes with ucLinux and Busybox. I am struggling to load a Git repository onto the device.

• No git
• No SSH so I cannot scp
• No support for HTTPS so I cannot wget directly from Github

I can be an FTP client so I've setup an FTP server that hosts a downloaded repo snapshot. But that only produces different problems:

• No support for ZIP files (thanks gunzip)
• No support for Git .tar.gz files [related]

This is the error presented when the Git archive is untarred:

[~]# tar -xvf phenocam-installation-tool-master.tar
pax_global_header
tar: Unknown file type 'g' in tar file

I've only been able to work around this by manually extracting the archive and creating a new one. At this point, I can retrieve the new archive via FTP.

My question is: what aren't I doing right? It doesn't make sense that there isn't a better approach, but I lack to the experience to see it.

Answer 1

You're not doing something wrong per se. One of the things that matters a lot to embedded developers is 'space'; they'll often ship a system that has as little 'extra' functionality that isn't need for the advertised functionality as possible.

If your device's advertised functionality doesn't require it to talk with other systems on the network in a secure manner, it's not at all surprising that there is no support for encryption available. If you need it, you'll need to take care of it yourself.

Two things you could try:

• if the lack of HTTPS support is simply the lack of a trust store (i.e., there are no trusted root certificates available) and you're dealing with real wget rather than busybox wget, pass wget the option --no-check-certificates.
• alternatively, you can try to set up a development environment for the device and compile the missing bits yourself, then copy them to the system. Note that this may result in lack of available space in the end, though.