Recently in NAS Category

As you saw in my last post, I was not happy at all of the firmware that my new NAS came with.

After playing with it for just one hour, I decided to see which chip it was based on and what was around in terms of hacks and (hopefully) improvements. As I was saying some days ago, I was really happy and excited to find that there's a great guy, LordScaffard, that completed the first porting of OpenWrt for this NAS!

So, of course, I was immediately looking at how to flash my NAS with that OpenWrt flavour. The bad news was that I needed to build an interface. This is because the standard RS-232 interface, which is the common serial interface that there's on the PC, works with logical signal of +12 Volts and -12 Volts that are too high for the serial interface that is on the NAS which is a TTL one. This one is working a + 3,3 Volts signal, so there's the need to use a logical signal converter that may adapt the RS-232 to the right voltage used in the NAS.

I managed to avoid to build such interface last year, when I was working on the Fonera. At that time, I was coding something in OpenWRT and I was flashing quite everyday my Fonera. So I bought the components needed for the serial adapter but I never built it. I was lucky and I flashed sucessfully the Fonera via software, so I didn't needed the serial interface.

So, at least this time I was able to decide to hack the NAS and to hack it really without going out to the electronics shop to buy the components! :o)
Anyway, it requires really few components: 5 capacitors and an integrated circuit!

So, after writing last post, I immediately started to build up my serial interface converter!
I used this electric schematics but I strongly recommand anyone that would like to try to build it to visit also this great page that shows by photo how to setup the converter on a prototyping board. Basically the circuit is using a MAX232 chip which is an integrated circuit that holds all the components to build the converter itself. It needs just some external capacitors to raise up the voltage from the +3,3 Volts to the +12 Volts.

You probably will find so many schematics in the Internet for this converter, and most probably you'll find it with different capacitors values. Basically there are several version of the original MAX232 and some of this version are capable to work with smaller condenser. In my case I used an equivalent chip, the ST232CN, with 5 electrolytic capacitors of 1 micro Farad each (and it worked out perfectly :o).

I followed the same suggestion that I gave you and soldered all the components on a prototyping board: easy and quick! Then I soldered also a DB-9 connector and a jumper connector that I got from an unused chip connector. The DB-9 connector is (of course) needed to connect to the PC's serial interface and the jumper connector is used to connect on the NAS board.

I plugged all together and......nothing worked out!!!
I checked and re-checked all the connections, I was really depressed because after two hours of work I didn't had any result, and, in addition, I didn't had the possibility to change the loosy firmware that was on the NAS!

After several minutes spend in carefully checking all the connections, I discovered that a bast...ehm a very mischievous pin of the chip was bent internally! It was the 16th pin, the Vcc! The pin that is powering up the chip itself! I unbent and inserted it properly with an extreme gentleness, I crossed the fingers and.....voilà!
 
OpenWRT is, of course, working ten times better than the original firmware. The porting by LordScaffard is not at 100%, it still lacks support for some functions and pheripherals. So (this will not sound strange for those who knows me) I immediately wrote him an email and............actually, even if I'm not a real programmer, I'm trying to give him an hand to adapt a more recent Linux kernel for the chip of the NAS!

LordScaffard is incredibly smart in kernel programming, and he's teaching me tons of things. On the other side, I'm trying to do my best, I'm learning really a lot and, of course, I'm enjoying a lot!

I really hope to see the kernel porting completion and, hopefully, to give an acceptable contribution to it. After that, it should be more easy to let all other OpenWRT packages work on this architecture!

Stay tuned!

Today arrived my new NAS!
I bought it on EBay, bidding from a German Ebayer that was really honest, precise and quick in the transaction.

I've choosen this particular one because it has 2 bays so it can hold up to 2 hard disks either Parallel ATA (PATA/IDE) or Serial ATA (SATA) and it has a 1 Gigabit Ethernet interface (instead of the common FastEthernet 10/100 Mbps). In addition there's an USB 1.1 port that can be used to attach to a printer in order to have the NAS acting also as a network printer server.

My first and quick test was with two old IDE hard disks of 6,5 and 40 GBytes. I just plugged them in and boot up the NAS to see what would happen.

To be really honest I was not happy of the product at the first test. I have a major problem regarding the network connectivity. The logical link is continuously flapping and I am able to operate on its HTTP interface only from time to time. From the network disk access point of view I have to wait when the NAS is reachable (when the logical link is up) and then access files, during copies or file moves the logical link is stable. So I had to launch big copies in order to work on the interface and look into menus and functions.

I think that this problem is coming from the fact that the switch that I'm using is a 10/100 Mbps and the NAS network driver is not enough able to handle the speed autosensing. Unfortunately there's no way to configure a fixed interface speed on it so I can't correct this problem for now.

So, basically it may be a good product but actually it has a crappy firmware and it is already the latest version!
So I immediately made some searches regarding it's chipset to find more informations and, hopefully solutions for the firmware.

I found that it the unit is a 35-HD-DUAL-NAS-E manufactured by MRT Communication. It is based on a well known StorLink chipset, the SL3516E from the Gemini family based on ARM processor. This means that probably there is a porting of some linux flavour to this platform.

Infact, some web searches after I discovered that there's an entire NAS-Central section regarding this unit. It is the MRT section where there's already available a porting of TinkyLS firmware and, wow, a very old friend: OpenWRT!

Great!
I think that next step will be to replace the original firmware with a more familiar one, and, hopefully compile by myself my favourite flavour of OpenWRT patckages! Unfortunately the actual firmware may be replaced just by using an interface to connect on the internal serial interface. So, the real next step will be to build up this serial interface!

Stay tuned!