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

juhog wrote:

Interesting. How does this compare to running Debian on the device?

I don't know, I didn't try debian.

Is there any difference in performance or memory usage?

Alt-F was "designed" to be flashed, so some compromises had to be made.

For one, all apps are compiled with -Os, to save precious flash memory. This has some impact on performance. I have even compiled everything using the ARM-thumb instruction set, which gives a 25% global redution in executables size (but is not lzma compressible, so no benefits).

Also, most of the the rootfs (/usr) is in squashfs-lzma, using only 5.6MB of memory instead of 19MB, but it incurs the decompression overhead.

On the other side, debian apps run from disk (I believe), while Alt-F apps run from memory; this makes its faster and somehow saves energy and disk life.
Only with all services running I see a small amount of swap being used, so in most scenarios no swap will be used at all.

Both can be run without flashing anything

That was a concern, that's why Alt-F has as a firmware upgrade webpage that can flash vendor distributed firmware, so users can revert the box back to dlink or conceptronics state without messing with serial ports or command line commands.

, but this is much more compact and lightweight than any complete linux distro, so this could be very good for "the masses".

I think that the builtin web pages make the difference -- Alt-F is not a generic distro, it was conceived for the DNS323, and the average user can use it without needing to type anything on the console, if he don't want or don't know how to do it. But he can :-)

Have you actually tried it? Any problems worth reporting? On a rev-B1 hardware?

mushanga wrote:

For information I've tried it on a C1 hw and as for Debian, Gentoo and all no DLINK kernel, the network link does not come up on my 100M switch
So I was not able to log in anything but it has definitly booted since I was able to use the power switch 2x 3sec to properly shut it down.

Not all bad news, at least we now know that leds and buttons work on a vanilla(*) 2.6.33.1 kernel on the rev-C1 board.

(*) only patched on the filesystems area, with aufs and squashfs-lzma.

Sadly I don't have any serial connection to debug further so I'm currently stuck here...
I will try to boot it directly connected to my macbook to see if the link comes up and log in.

Anyway have you any C1 to devellop?
If not I am willing to help, with the means I have.

I have a B1 board, we have to rely on someone with a rev-C1 board and a serial link to debug the problem.

I had problems with the network when I tried "reloading" Alt-F. Usualy I develop with a flashed Alt-F, and had no problems, so the problem must be related with "reloading" and the network hardware initialization.

When reloading from the vendor's firmware (DLink-1.08) I had to bring the network interface down and up several times until it works -- I could build a special /etc/init.d/rcS to debug that problem, but lets wait a bit more to see if anybody can diagnose it.

Thanks,
Joao

The answer is on the web page you have to use the alt-f config page to upload to flash.
http://code.google.com/p/alt-f/wiki/HowToInstallAndUse

Your disk is defective. At least linux can't deal with it. Can you use it on another hardware? Have you hot-pluged it? Was it the disk you used to reload Alt-F?
And how did you tried to format it? Using Alt-F? What hardware board are you using?

Please give details, otherwise we can't help youi.

Joao

Still too few details.

I tested Alt-F with 4 different internal disks, hot-plugging (inserting and removing) them without any problems or loss of data. I tested it also with two external USB disks and two usb pen drives.

# eject right                                                                
Ejecting sda... done                                                         
                                                                         
---> manually ejecting drive: 

ata1: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x180000 action 0x6 frozen        
ata1: edma_err_cause=00000020 pp_flags=00000000, SError=00180000             
ata1: hard resetting link                                                    
ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)                                
ata1: hard resetting link                                                    
ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)                                
ata1: limiting SATA link speed to 1.5 Gbps                                   
ata1: hard resetting link                                                    
ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 310)                                
ata1.00: disabled                                                            
ata1: EH complete                                                            
ata1.00: detaching (SCSI 0:0:0:0)                                            
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronizing SCSI cache                                   
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=0x04 driverbyte=0x00                      
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Stopping disk                                              
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] START_STOP FAILED                                          
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=0x04 driverbyte=0x00                      
md: linear personality unregistered                                          
md: raid1 personality unregistered                                           

--> manually reinserting disk:

ata1: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x4010000 action 0xe frozen
ata1: edma_err_cause=00000010 pp_flags=00000000, dev connect          
ata1: hard resetting link                                             
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)                
ata1.00: ATA-7: HDS728080PLA380, PF2OA69A, max UDMA/133               
ata1.00: 160836480 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)          
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133                                      
ata1: EH complete                                                     
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      HDS728080PLA380  PF2O PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 160836480 512-byte logical blocks: (82.3 GB/76.6 GiB)     
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off                                      
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA                                                                         
 sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4                                                       
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk 
Adding 530104k swap on /dev/sda1.  Priority:1 extents:1 across:530104k          
md: bind<sda2>                                                                  
md: raid1 personality registered for level 1                                    
raid1: raid set md0 active with 1 out of 2 mirrors                              
md0: detected capacity change from 0 to 78386823168                             
 md0: unknown partition table                                                   
md: bind<sda3>                                                                  
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds                                  
EXT3-fs (sda4): using internal journal                                          
EXT3-fs (sda4): mounted filesystem with writeback data mode

ColinW wrote:

Hi,
As an aside, is there any way that your firmware would allow the DNS to be seen as an iSCSI target?

Colin

I'm not familiar with iSCSI. Has the dns-323 enought power for that?

Currently there is no kernel support for iSCSI, but there is a small amount of flash one could still use, or it could be compiled as a module, if small.
As for userland programs/daemons, if any, they don't fit in the available flash, so they would need to be added as a package.
I'm considering ipkg (but the executables distributed by the optware dns323 feed don't run on Alt-F -- there might be some compilation incompatibilities).

ColinW wrote:

Not sure about the processing requirements, however there are quite a few other NAS devices which offer the functionality natively.
Here: http://www.ardistech.com/iscsi/ is the latest target version I could find which works both with Linux and Windows.

Colin

I found/feel the dns-323 equivalent to an old P3@500MHz I had. I tried RAID-0 on that host and giveup -- no benefits.

SCSI over ethernet seems too much overhead on a host that without it has roughly 30MB/sec internal disc throughput... but why are we arguing? lets evaluate it :-)

KRH wrote:

jcard i have reformated a "SAMSUNG SP2504C - 250.1 GB" from the d-link webinterface and then use fun_plug to boot your firmware and are unabel to access the disk gets same error as on the erlyer link.

The disk works fine in the d-link webinterface, i can try set it to run alt-f it fails, any advice?
[EDIT]
The disk's works fine on a usb enclosure, running fsck on a 1tb drive right now.

DNS-232 A1
Current Firmware Version :      1.08
Firmware Date :      05/15/2009

i have seriel console

Sorry, I miss the above info that was reported when you said "Can not upload the firmware from the webinterface".

The log you sent was obtained through the serial interface, and as it was always giving that error messages you endup powering the box off, right?

So the problem has to be the rev-A1 board, as Revision A1 board uses a 88F5181 processor with a separate SATA chip. However the kernel should automaticaly handle that difference, and the driver is the same for both boards.

Does the disk has a jumper for selecting 1.5Gbps or 3Gbps SATA transfer speed? I think I remember reading something like that in the forum..

Or do you have another, older disk, that you can try?

A more involved way would be to reload ffp to a tmpfs (as if doing a disk fsck), remove the disk, reload Alt-F from within the reloaded ffp, and insert a pen or USB disk. But this is only worth if you use it for debugging what is wrong.

Have you ever tried other kernel, such as the debian netboot install? I *don't know* if it works on rev-A1 boards.

Sorry, I don't have any other clues for you

Anybody had success with a A1 board? And with a C1 board? Any success at all? :-S

After fighting for two days I finally managed to get ALT-F 1B1 running on my B1.

Since I do not have a seral connection it was kind of a blind flight without instruments.

The box was running 1.08b5
After each start of alt-f it looked like the kernel was reloaded but I could not get network access.
So, I downloaded  1.09b1 and flashed it onto my box.

With this firmware version alt-f immediately started to work.


Just a few remarks:

In order to make the created "reload.sh" work I had to add a few "\" to the fun_plug script e.g.
==================================
for i in \$proc; do
        if test -n "\$(pidof \$i)"; then
                kill \$(pidof \$i)
                sleep 1
                if test -n "\$(pidof \$i)"; then
                        kill -9 \$(pidof \$i)
                fi
        fi
done
==================================

Without these you end up with empty variables  in the reload.sh script.

I tried this with rev B fw 1.06. It did not work. I think the reload didnt work, box froze. I may try this again later.
Now I go back to fonz reloaded fw 1.04 with kernel NFS support. It works very well for me.

nogi wrote:

Just a few remarks:

In order to make the created "reload.sh" work I had to add a few "\" to the fun_plug script e.g.
==================================
for i in \$proc; do
        if test -n "\$(pidof \$i)"; then
                kill \$(pidof \$i)
                sleep 1
                if test -n "\$(pidof \$i)"; then
                        kill -9 \$(pidof \$i)
                fi
        fi
done
==================================

Without these you end up with empty variables  in the reload.sh script.

Stupid of me!
That's the reason why "reloaded" fails so often!

I will update fun_plug in the downloads page after I finish my Easter holydays,

Thanks

jcard wrote:

nogi wrote:

Just a few remarks:

In order to make the created "reload.sh" work I had to add a few "\" to the fun_plug script e.g.
==================================
for i in \$proc; do
        if test -n "\$(pidof \$i)"; then
                kill \$(pidof \$i)
                sleep 1
                if test -n "\$(pidof \$i)"; then
                        kill -9 \$(pidof \$i)
                fi
        fi
done
==================================

Without these you end up with empty variables  in the reload.sh script.

Stupid of me!
That's the reason why "reloaded" fails so often!

I will update fun_plug in the downloads page after I finish my Easter holydays,

Thanks

A few additional remarks:

I'm not yet using the "firmware" version but the "reloaded" version.

The ffp package downloads fine and is also installaed.
But every try to start one of the executables inmediately end s with a segmentation fault.

As I'm not very deep into LINUX the only thing I can see is that e.g. busybox of alt-f and busybox of ffp use completly differnt sets of libs.

========= Busybox alt-f ==============================
# ldd /bin/busybox
/bin/busybox: is setuid
        libc.so.0 => /lib/libc.so.0 (0x4000d000)
        ld-uClibc.so.0 => /lib/ld-uClibc.so.0 (0x40000000)

========= Busybox ffp 0.5 ============================

# ldd /ffp/bin/busybox
/ffp/bin/busybox: is setuid
checking sub-depends for '/ffp/lib/libcrypt.so.0'
checking sub-depends for '/ffp/lib/libm.so.0'
checking sub-depends for '/ffp/lib/libc.so.0'
        libcrypt.so.0 => /ffp/lib/libcrypt.so.0 (0x00000000)
        libm.so.0 => /ffp/lib/libm.so.0 (0x00000000)
        libc.so.0 => /ffp/lib/libc.so.0 (0x00000000)
        /ffp/lib/ld-uClibc.so.0 => /ffp/lib/ld-uClibc.so.0 (0x00000000)

=================================================

Could this be the reason?


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