October 7, 2018

TP-Link AP225 - Omada management software

This is some kind of software you can use to manage an AP225 wireless access point. It will run on Linux or Windows. Since I am a Linux person, I downloaded that to see what it would do for me. I download Omada_Controller_V3.0.2_Linux_x64.deb, which is a 107M file. This is a debian package, which is somewhat inconvenient for me since I am on Fedora.

There is a tool called "alien" that claims to convert such things to RPM. I tried the following. It did not work, and I moved on to other things. 

# this does not work
su
dnf install alien
alien -r Omada_Controller_V3.0.2_Linux_x64.deb
It turns out that a "deb" file is actually an "ar" achive, so you can use the ar command to unbundle it. When I do this, I get two files. 
control.tar.gz
data.tar.xz
It turns out that the "control" tarball has some small scripts that manage or augment the debian package scheme. The "data" tarball has the Omada software. This is intended to get unpacked into /opt/tplink/EAPController. It is some kind of big java application (and it may be big by virtue of being bundled with the Java JRE, I cannot tell). Once it is unpacked, it will make the following links: 
/opt/tplink/EAPController/jre/bin/ControlPanel -> jcontrol
/opt/tplink/EAPController/jre/lib/amd64/server/libjsig.so -> ../libjsig.so
/usr/bin/tpeap -> /opt/tplink/EAPController/bin/control.sh
/etc/init.d/tpeap -> /opt/tplink/EAPController/bin/control.sh
I have not pursued this any further. Via con Dios if you press on with this.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / [email protected]