This article is currently an experimental machine translation and may contain errors. If anything is unclear, please refer to the original Chinese version. I am continuously working to improve the translation.
I once saw the Wanku Cloud mining fiasco and couldn’t resist buying one of these e-waste units to play with. (Only 30-40 RMB on Taobao, including shipping.)
Sure, it’s not powerful—hardware-wise it only has USB 2.0 ports (oddly enough, it does have a gigabit Ethernet port though).
But since my Raspberry Pi died recently, I figured I’d bring this little guy home and have some fun tinkering with it.
Man, this thing is not easy to work with… Never mind having to拆机, solder TTL pins, and flash the firmware—after flashing one of those widely-shared Armbian images, Docker still wouldn’t run.
I’d tried all sorts of things before with no luck. At one point I even considered running Docker inside QEMU—needless to say, that was painfully slow.
Back around National Day, I stumbled upon a custom Armbian build that someone had adapted specifically for this device—and even better, they open-sourced it: https://www.right.com.cn/forum/thread-4031529-1-1.html
I’m not super experienced with Linux or hardware, so when I flashed their Armbian image, Docker still threw errors.
After digging around, I found out the kernel was missing the mqueue module.
Well, since the source was available, I just cloned it, added the missing module, and rebuilt the whole thing.
Spent a whole day during National Day debugging—fixed a few minor bugs here and there by just Googling the error messages. Nothing too fancy.
I even posted my build on Enshan forum (link below), where you can also find the download: https://www.right.com.cn/forum/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=4061814&page=1#pid10508190
(Though I procrastinated and posted it late—by then, others had already shared their own Docker-compatible Armbian builds…)
Funny how things change—this “mining junk” device has found new life recently as a tool for monetizing idle bandwidth via an app called Tian Tang Xinyuan (“Sweet Home”). You just install the app and share your connection. But since I’m not here to advertise, I won’t share a referral code. I’ll just monitor it for a while and see how much (if any) money it actually makes…?
This article is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Author: lyc8503, Article link: https://blog.lyc8503.net/en/post/wanke-compile/
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