Developping applications on top of Ciscos AXP router can be extremely annoying. The router reboots after each install or uninstall of a package, the process of building the signed installation packages is cumbersome, the packages need afterwards to be pushed to an ftp server, … When debugging a Linux application that does not use the Cisco APIs the installation process can easily eat up most of your time.
After a whole day of packet installations i finally had the idea to simply put wget on the router in order to pull my software from the router directly into the vhost. I added OpenSSH (Server and Client) and vim and after some initial struggles, the toolbox was ready.
To install sth one can simply install the toolbox and then download the actual software via scp, http or ftp (using wget) directly onto the vhost without bothering about the whole package building process. Also one can run an ssh server on an alternative port in order to directly ssh into the vhost, bypassing the AXP router CLI.
The build is actually pretty simple. One just needs to take care of the dependencies and optional packets, specially for OpenSSH, compile the binaries, build and sign a packet with the provided CISCO scripts. A precompiled version of the tools for AXP 1.1.1 is available here, just remember to specify the debug package as dependecy in order to get a shell in the vhost. Also a refinement with a postinstall script etc could be nice.