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

ERmmm... can't say I'm very good at this stuff... are those commands I can type at the command prompt (anywhere), or how do I do that?
And yes I did check with network cable unplugged, which seemed to not make a difference :S

Thanks for the reply, hope you (or somebody else) can guide me somewhat more specific as to how to perform those checks.
Right now the unit is actually sitting quiet though

It could be the UPnP Server indexing files, if you don't use it try to deactivate it.
The commands posted by silversurfer are meant for running them through telnet/ssh on the device... the wiki is your friend

Hehehe thanks for the advice. I'll check those uPnP and other things. Currently the unit serves one single purpose only, that of being a NAS; storage for movies and music so that we can put it there from our own pc's and access it from the HTPC and all without having to have all computers powered on etc etc. So nothing fancy right now, as I simply don't have the time to dig into it. Nor do we pay our own powerbill at the moment (thinking of advantages such as using inbuilt torrent client instead of having pc on all night   ).

I'm also not quite sure what uPnP is, but will have a read. The activity does indeed sound like some kind of indexing is going on, like after a fresh install and starting up dc++ and it has to hash all files. I did recently swap harddisks and copy over everything to the newer (bigger) ones. So wouldn't be completely unlogical either, I guess.

Thanks!

I don't think that any of the standard funplug processes will eventually start up the disks. There are many fan control scripts so I can't tell if this one is responsible for the spin ups. The standard firmware services can be the source of this issue as well, the upnp server for instance. Try turning off services that you don't need.

On my system I'm only using ffp, sshd, samba and a modified fan script and all of this is started from the USB drive. The disks fall asleep when there is nothing to do and wake up only when I access files that reside on them. Samba is the only process which accesses the hard disks but only when I access a share. I can keep the shares connected, the disks will still fall asleep when I don't use a share. That's how it should be.

The same should be true about FTP access. It should only spin up the disks when there is access to one of the files located there.

It seems that my little box has calmed down now, at least. Although sometimes the disks do spin up without me doing much.... (nothing?). That doesn't bother me though. Thanks again!

There are entries in "dmesg" that show that the disks were spinning up or falling asleep. Unfortunately there are no times attached to the entries.
I didn't dig into the system so far, so I don't know if dmesg can easily be manipulated to show the date and time of the entries too.

flashman1207 wrote:

silversurfer wrote:

There are entries in "dmesg" that show that the disks were spinning up or falling asleep. Unfortunately there are no times attached to the entries.
I didn't dig into the system so far, so I don't know if dmesg can easily be manipulated to show the date and time of the entries too.

How do I access/use dmesg? Am a bit worried I might stuff it up !!! (again)

With telnet/ssh access. 'cat /var/log/messages' should show these entries with date and time, along some other info.

On the CH3SNAS the syslog deamon is not running by default but you can start the syslog and kernellog deamon manually from telnet/ssh prompt:

    /ffp/sbin/syslogd -O /tmp/syslog/syslog.txt -s 300
    /ffp/sbin/klogd -c 3

The  -s 300 option will limit the size of syslog.txt file so the ram disk would not be filled completely with loggings.

After that you can see all dmesg messages and more with time stamps by typing the following command from the telnet/ssh prompt:

    cat /tmp/syslog/syslog.txt | more

Last edited by EnricoM (2008-07-26 08:22:40)

1. Yes, the disk should stay spun down since the command tells syslog to log to /tmp which is in memory and not on your hard disk.

2. The standard funplug has a start script (syslogd.sh) in its /ffp/start folder. Doing a "chmod 755 /ffp/start/syslogd.sh" will enable syslog on every start of your NAS.
This syslog daemon is running with standard options since there is no config file for it. You can set options by changing the syslogd.sh script a bit and adding flags for syslogd.
Mine looks like that at the moment:

...
name="syslogd"
syslogd_flags="-O /mnt/USB/var/log/messages"
klogd_flags="-c 3"
...

It is logging to my USB drive. Just change the path to your liking,  /tmp for example.

3. You can see the total RAM usage with the command "free". If you want to know how much space is left on your RAM disk then issue the command "df /".

I'm not sure but I don't think that syslog will create directories on it own. It will create the file syslog.txt if it is not there already but not the /tmp/syslog directory. Better tell syslog to log to /tmp/syslog.txt instead.

Btw, if you don't want to have every info message in your syslog, you can limit syslog to only log "important" messages. The -l parameter is for this purpose. Unfortunately I didn't find documentation about what each level represents, not even on the busybox web site.
I think I figured it out anyway.

Levels seem to be:

1 = LOG_EMERG
2 = LOG_ALERT
3 = LOG_CRIT
4 = LOG_ERR
5 = LOG_WARNING
6 = LOG_NOTICE
7 = LOG_INFO
8 = LOG_DEBUG

What about level 0? I don't have a tool to test syslog to find the correct mapping. Maybe level 0 is LOG_EMERG and level 8 is LOG_INFO and there are gaps between the standard syslog levels? I can at least say that I set my syslog to level 5 and it is logging warnings and messages of more critical level. I don't care about info messages on my NAS.


@fonz

Syslogd already has a default log size of "-s 200". Do you really think it is necessary to increase its size?
Do you have the correct mappings for the log levels?

Thanks for all the replies, I feel I am learning a lot.

Fonz...... If I go back to using the default syslogd.sh (thereby logging to /var/log/messages) won't this cause the disks to spin up? Won't it write to disk and not RAM?

silversurfer..... would the format be

 syslogd_flags="-O /tmp/syslog.txt -l 5"

Will Log level 5 show the disk spin/down info?

Regards
Tony