DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

Update.  I have now gone back to the 1.03 firmware and the drives are acting normally (no degradation).  Both drive lights blue.  Seems to be an issue with the firmware.

could it be a combination of firmware and HDDs?  Note that Arjan has the white LED and degraded disk after upgrading to 1.04.  Also,  I recall he also had 400 GB WD disks.

Hello,

I support a few of DNS-323s with different makes of drives..  All of which operate in RAID 1.  I believe there are issues with firmware (including 1.04) that need attention in the upper layers, meaning web pages and compiled in scripts.

I observed that sometimes they do not report the correct status.   I suspect that the amber light  is one such event that is created by upper layer web pages and scripts establishing the wrong status.  I would check it out using a stable version compatible with the kernel.  The one they have in 1.04 is version 2.5.6 which has issues to be resolved (like using deprecated ioctls) in relation to kernel.

The other thing to watch out for is 1.03 formats disk into two partitions, while 1.04 creates an extra partition.  So what you observe after upgrade will depend on whether or not you reformat the disks.  In all the sites I support, I have chosen not reformat after upgrading to 1.04 firmware.

I don't have time to look into the details, but the web pages and (compiled) scripts need quite a bit of attention to address these issues and I am hoping there will be updates soon from D-LINK based on what people report about problems like this.

Jaya

Edit: Earlier version said RAID 0 which is incorrect.

Last edited by jayas (2008-02-23 05:27:34)

I think you missed one point - the fact that ghostridergrey managed to get both disks in "blue light mode" after downgrading to 1.03, is an important aspect of the hypothesis - by downgrading he would have removed the S.M.A.R.T support, and thereby appear to make the error go away, when in fact he has simply removed the reporting mechanism.

Never the less - as you say, until someone can show that 1.04 supports S.M.A.R.T. (and I have no evidence that it does) then it remains nothing more than a hypothesis.

The only reason I present this theory is that whilst ghostridergrey's <upgrade, get error, downgrade, get rid of error> process may appear to prove that the firmware is flawed, firmware flaws are usually reproducible, and in my opinion, there aren't that enough reports of users with the problem to substantiate the claim.

Yup - that would be sufficient.

But - all I wanted to do was present a plausible reason for 1.04 to cause a disk failure indication that 1.03 didn't - so mission accomplished.

As I said earlier, I feel that if it were a firmware flaw, as against the firmware responding to something the disks are doing, then a lot more of us would be reporting white/amber leds.  Firmware flaws have a habit of being reproducible, take the >2GB file copy one, or the print queue causing a spin-up one.  Too many people, tech support, included, blame firmware when they can't think of anything else.

I'd like to believe that DLink has done something, perhaps in the form of disk failure or error detection, it doesn't necessarily have to be S.M.A.R.T, that causes the indicator.

From a personal standpoint, I never got anything but a blue LED prior to 1.04, but I have managed to get what I believe is the white one (or blue & amber together) with 1.04 when fooling around with JBOD, but since I was removing & reinserting the disks at the time trying to force an error it was not entirely unexpected.

Cazaril

A failing hard drive would be my guess - if you have the data backed up, try swapping the disks around, if the amber LED follows the disks, then the unit is definitely detecting something that it's not happy with - either the disk or the data contained theirn.

I haven't managed to get my fun-plug working yet.   Will do so sometime next week.   In the meantime,  I am getting the hard disk back to the manurfacturer's agent to determine if anything is wrong with the hard disk.

Thanks for all the comments everyone!

I did try to swap the physical disks.  DNS did not recognise it and asked for the hard disks to be swapped back.

Last edited by Cazaril (2008-02-24 14:05:34)

Hello,

Is it DLNA compliant ? (DNS 313, 323)

Just to add to the statistics:
Upgraded my DNS-323 to 1.04 last week and this morning I noticed the right led was amber. Might have happened earlier but I don't look at them everyday

The same on my side, after updating to 1.04 the RAID 1 gets degraded and one of the disks is not in the array anymore.
I have to manually add the disk to the array using either

"mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sda2" or

"mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sdb2"

depending on which disk got removed from the array.

I never had this problem with firmware 1.03

ripe_md

Ardjan wrote:

The funny part: while the drive was in the DNS323 and was showing the white/amber LED, it behaved perfectly normal. Both the Raid1 volume (as it should be :-)) and the JBOD volume worked as expected.

So, the thought of an error in 1.04 really comes to mind, imho...

Hi Ardjan,

I agree.  Blue signals drive is running normally and amber signals drive has failed.  Having both on all the time does suggests the DNS-323 is having trouble working out what its position is in relation to drive status.

[It is possible rogue code turns on the amber light and possibly signals error state that has little to do with drive failure, and which is ignored by the rest of the system hence leaving the blue light on.]

Some questions:

1/  What does the status page say when this happens?

2/  Enable email alerts and see if you get A drive has failed alert when this happens.

3/  If you are game enough, install fun_plug and do a dmesg to see if that holds any clues.

Hope this helps.

Jaya

jayas wrote:

1/  What does the status page say when this happens?

The Raid1 says 'degraded', the JBOD is ok. Both are working, as far as I can see. In fact, the only error I see is the white LED, nothing else yet...
Today I finally managed it to test the drive thorougly with the WD provided test-program. No SMART issues displayed, no bed sectors, nothing that points to an error.

jayas wrote:

2/  Enable email alerts and see if you get A drive has failed alert when this happens.

Not done yet.

jayas wrote:

3/  If you are game enough, install fun_plug and do a dmesg to see if that holds any clues.

Excerpt of dmesg.out:

Linux version 2.6.12.6-arm1 (jack@SWTEST2) (gcc version 3.3.3) #29 Thu Dec 27 09:59:48 CST 2007
<snip>
scsi0 : Marvell SCSI to SATA adapter
scsi1 : Marvell SCSI to SATA adapter
scsi2 : Marvell SCSI to SATA adapter
scsi3 : Marvell SCSI to SATA adapter
  Vendor: WDC       Model: WD4000YR-01PLB0   Rev: 01.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 03
  Vendor: WDC       Model: WD4000YR-01PLB0   Rev: 01.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 03
Attached scsi generic sg0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0,  type 0
Attached scsi generic sg1 at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0,  type 0
<snip>
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Freeing init memory: 112K
SCSI device sda: 781422768 512-byte hdwr sectors (400088 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
SCSI device sda: 781422768 512-byte hdwr sectors (400088 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
 sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sdb: 781422768 512-byte hdwr sectors (400088 MB)
SCSI device sdb: drive cache: write back
SCSI device sdb: 781422768 512-byte hdwr sectors (400088 MB)
SCSI device sdb: drive cache: write back
 sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 sdb4
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
<snip>
Adding 530104k swap on /dev/sda1.  Priority:-1 extents:1
Adding 530104k swap on /dev/sdb1.  Priority:-2 extents:1
ext3: No journal on filesystem on sda2
EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended
ext3: No journal on filesystem on sda3
ext3: No journal on filesystem on sdb2
EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended
ext3: No journal on filesystem on sdb3
ext3: No journal on filesystem on sda4
EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended
ext3: No journal on filesystem on sdb4
EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended
md: md0 stopped.
md: bind<sdb2>
md: bind<sda2>
md: kicking non-fresh sdb2 from array!
md: unbind<sdb2>
md: export_rdev(sdb2)
raid1: raid set md0 active with 1 out of 2 mirrors
md: md1 stopped.
md: bind<sdb3>
md: bind<sda3>
EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended
ext3: No journal on filesystem on sda4
EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended
ext3: No journal on filesystem on sdb4
EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended
Link Layer Topology Discovery Protocol, version 1.05.1223.2005
dev is  <NULL>

Hmm, what do these ext3 references mean in the last few lines? I thought that ext3 was not in the >1.02 firmware anymore?

---

Attachments:
dmesg.out, Size: 6,978 bytes, Downloads: 544