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

racerx wrote:

1. If I want to reinstall a clean debian install at a later date can I do this without a serial cable? I was hoping I could just insert a blank drive(s) and the firmware would start the installer again? Is this correct?

Nope, I'm afraid that won't work.  If you have a running Debian system and want to reinstall, you can simply flash the installer again.  However, if your hard drive breaks or something happens, you'll need a serial console to recover the system.  The reason for that is that the installer is not kept in flash when Debian is installed.

racerx wrote:

2. I know there is a new kernal available to support fan control: http://www.cyrius.com/journal/debian/or … nk/dns-323 and its possible to configure pwmconfig to auto control the fan... but has anyone actuall done this and can confirm how well it works?

I had various people tell me that it works fine.

racerx wrote:

3. How about drive spindown, both onboard and usb? I read a thread that I cant for the life of me find via search now that talks about using HD-parm in rc.local to configure spindown in debian, can anyone give any more info on the sucess on this?

There were some discussions about hard drive spindown under Debian in the QNAP forum, see http://forum.qnap.com/viewforum.php?f=147  However, since Debian runs from disk, it won't be able to spindown as much as a system that runs from flash.

racerx wrote:

4. 1gbit performance? How well does the device perform running native debian? I can get around the 20mb/sec mark up/down from a samba share with the dlink firmware before the cpu maxs out... is this comparable running native debian?

No idea, sorry.

Thanks for the info, Ive been busy and only just had a chance to install Debian today. It all went smoothly, but I do have a few more questions/observations for others. Any comments are appreciated:

1. (good reading: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Softw … WTO/#ss2.3 )
I wanted to create a raid1 device and then have '/boot' '/' and 'swap' partitions on it. I realize that having swap on a raid1 device is not needed but it would be just to make things neater Unfortunately this being my first use of software raid (only ever used hardware raid & lvm on enterprise class gear) i had some issues and eventually read that software raid is limited to one partition per md* device: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Softw … HOWTO/#s11

So I then created a volume group on the physical md0 volume and attempted to create a /boot logical volume but the installer errored out. I had a look at /var/log/syslog and lvm creation was failing due to low system memory. I freed up memory using the low mem install options but it still wasnt enough. Im sure this could be worked around more but decided to give up
In the end I settled with 3 raid volumes:
md0 for /boot
md1 for /
md2 for swap

not ideal at all and if one disk fails I will get 3 times the warnings etc, but I wasn't sure how else to get around it without wasting any more time.


2. The installer hung at 93% 3 times, and then ended the session, downed the interface and I had to start from scratch. Not sure why, even using the lowmem install options. 4th worked fine though... weird huh?
I did notice that the first times I was using the ftp.uk.debian.org mirror and watching the network traffic on my router and when it came to download and install udev it timed out and no traffic was present... when switching to mirrorservice.org it worked. Dont know what was going on there.. but perhaps I was just getting timeouts and the installer was not failing gracefully. Not really a dns323 issue anyway i guess.

3. I cant reboot or shutdown the nas using 'reboot' 'shutdown -r now' 'shutdown -h now' etc. The 323 just drops the session and sits there. What is actually happening here? Whats the best way to reboot the box without physical interaction? Will init 6 work?

4. pwmconfig works well with Martins kernel, Ive been tuning the config a bit but cant seem to get rid of the 'fan pulsing' that used to be present back in the 1.03 firmware days before dlink made some changes. anyone else know what Im talking about? when it gets hot the fan seems to get into a cycle

5. The Power LED flashing constantly is very annoying, as is power button not functioning. Just found this thread: http://dns323.kood.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4427
but am yet to set it... anyone actually get this script working?


Things that work really well/reasons to go native:

1. Samba with inotfiy support from writes made remotely. I can now copy a file to the NAS or change a file name etc in my media library and the inotiy events are passed and media-tomb notices immediately YAY!
2. Media tomb supports inotiy so it doesn't need to scan for changes every 30 mins. Good with 2+Tb of media
3. full native kernel support for my usb rt8178 wifi card now. I can run kismet, and use the dns323 as a wifi AP.
5. nice to have a fully fledged debian box I can use for nmap/tcpdump/iptraf and general network stuff when other boxes are turned off.

Things Im still to setup/test:
1. wpa for the AP
2. The 2 1Tb usb drives I have installed can spindown with hdparm -Y /dev/sd* but the -S command doesnt work. I need to get these going to sleep automatically.
3. Mediatomb12-svn build supports thumbnails with the ffmpeglibrary package.. yet to test but will soon

All in all its early days but its a great effort from they guys who put the work in to make this possible. Cheers!

Dan

racerx wrote:

Ideally I would like the 2 raid disks with debian to spindown also. Im not sure what needs to be done here, could I just remount /var to a usb flash on boot, or are other parts of the filesystem accessed periodically too?

I have the whole / at an USB Drive. Only my /home is located at the RAID Array. Spindown works perfectly.

oxygen wrote:

I have the whole / at an USB Drive. Only my /home is located at the RAID Array. Spindown works perfectly.

Is this supported by the Debian installer of Martin Michlmayr? Any special actions needed or is it just selecting the USB-drive as root filesystem in the "partitioning and mount point selection" in the Debian installer?

kentsu wrote:

Does it do file system check to your / every now and then when booting up?

Probably not. It will take years to reached the standard max mount count (30 iirc) in a 24/7 operation scheme.

Xiphias wrote:

The number of mounts until check is a random value (something between 20 and 40). In a server situation the 180 days limit is probably sooner than 20 mounts. If you want a check at every boot you can tune it with tune2fs

ah yeah, the day limit. forgot about that. i guess the next reboot will take some time.

Not sure about howto correctly boot via labels myself. Guess it requires some chanes in the bootmanager config and fstab..but maybe rasto can enlight us on that one.

I do backup copies regularly by using dd to create full image copies of the usb stick. A simple #dd if=/dev/sda of=/somewhere/your.usb.image works for me. I did some recovery test by rewriting this image to a second usb stick from another systems - works.
Note that there is a certain risk of inconsistencies while doing this with mounted root partitions. Back up the stick from another system as an alternative.

kentsu wrote:

The thing boots up fine and I suppose I am in clear waters now.

lucky you. in fact booting from devices specified with LABEL=foo need special initrd support. seems debian can handle it (or falls back to default behaviour at least)

HamRadio wrote:

Hi,
I have a DNS 323 with 2x1,5TB disks in raid1.
I'm following this interesting thread because I'd like to install Debian on my DNS323 too.
Can someone please tell me what's the advantage of having / on an external usb stick against having / on a small (perhaps 500M to 1G) raid1 partition on the resident disks?
To be on the safe side against possible problems when changing/updating kernel, could it be a good idea having always the same simple (perhaps monolithic) kernel in the flash chip, having a kexec function that can boot another kernel on the disk?
Thank you for answering.

I'm working on a replacement U-Boot (for B1 hardware so far), that will be able to boot from SATA and USB directly, as well as TFTP booting via a DHCP server, falling back to the flash eventually.

That would allow for the netboot image to remain in flash indefinitely, as well as simplifying the installation and update process. Installing a new kernel would simply require placing the kernel on the SATA volume, rather than flashing it to the flash chip.

HamRadio wrote:

Can someone please tell me what's the advantage of having / on an external usb stick against having / on a small (perhaps 500M to 1G) raid1 partition on the resident disks?

The disks can spindown.

Hello,

I'm running nativ debian on the DNS323. I followed the procedure found on cyrius.com. But when I installed debian I only had 1 disk installed. Now I tried installing a second disk, but the system is not booting when the second disk is installed. If I boot with 1 disk and when the system is running I add the second disk , it works ok and I can use the second disk.
Can someone help me to solve this issue? Any lead?

C'ya

RoganDawes wrote:

madman wrote:

Hello,

I'm running nativ debian on the DNS323. I followed the procedure found on cyrius.com. But when I installed debian I only had 1 disk installed. Now I tried installing a second disk, but the system is not booting when the second disk is installed. If I boot with 1 disk and when the system is running I add the second disk , it works ok and I can use the second disk.
Can someone help me to solve this issue? Any lead?

C'ya

Try swapping the disks. Disk 1 should be in the right hand slot.

Thanks, it solved my problem.