I have decided to buy a NAS quite some time ago. After several attempts to make a decision: "which one", I finally bought Zyxel's NSA 325 v2. At a little bit less than 100 €, with its spec it seems like the the best bang for the buck now.
"The bang" for me is primary ability to run software of my choice instead of some crappy image created by a poor engineer trying to feed the management beast. Although it seems *BSD support Marvel's Kirkwood SoCs, and I do recognise *BSD as excellent server systems, I have decided to go "safe" and took the path I know best, that is Linux. It seems the mainline kernel has everything that is needed to use the hardware at its full potential. If that is not enough, Philipp Kirchhofer, added a few commits to the mainline v3.18, and published it on github. Philipp's code is based on v3.18.7, to be precise, but it can be rebased without any conflicts to v3.18.9. So far so good.
1 Day one
Since I haven't developed anything for ARM on my desktop Gentoo PC, I
had to install the toolchain. As you may expect it wasn't as quick as
apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi but Gentoo's crossdev -t
arm-linux-gnueabi -s1 isn't too difficult either. Next, some less
obvious stuff begins.
export ARCH=arm export CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- make nsa325_defconfig make menuconfig # iff you think you know what you're doing make nsa325
Suddenly!
Kernel: arch/arm/boot/zImage is ready DTC arch/arm/boot/dts/kirkwood-nsa325.dtb cat arch/arm/boot/zImage arch/arm/boot/dts/kirkwood-nsa325.dtb > zImage-dtb mkimage -A arm -O linux -T kernel -C none -a 0x00008000 -e 0x00008000 \ -n Linux-3.18.9 -d zImage-dtb uImage-dtb make: mkimage: Command not found Makefile:1234: recipe for target 'nsa325' failed make: *** [nsa325] Error 127
What a shame! I need to install dev-embedded/u-boot-tools to get
mkimage(1) to finally get a fresh and tasty kernel.
Image Name: Linux-3.18.9 Created: Thu Mar 19 22:23:55 2015 Image Type: ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed) Data Size: 2155228 Bytes = 2104.71 kB = 2.06 MB Load Address: 00008000 Entry Point: 00008000
All right, I have to clean up my desk a bit to have any space to disassemble the device to get to the serial console. No, today's not the day.
2 Day two
To manipulate the firmware of the NSA 325 v2 I am going to need to access its serial console (UART). It's not possible to attach it to an RS232-to-USB converter directly because the port works on 3.3V TTL levels (0 V - 3.3 V), while RS232 port requires much higher voltage amplitude (-12 V - +12 V). I've got a converter based on MAX3232, which in accepts Vcc between 3 V and 5.5 V and outputs ±5.4 on the RS-232 side. It works just fine with TP-Link's TL-WR1043ND (v1.x) which also has 3.3 V TTL UART. This is a custom circuit so the picture below is just for my reference. Tx/Rx on the TTL side are named from the standpoint of the DTE attached to RS-232 side.
+----------------------+
| |
| |
Vcc |--+ |--+
GND |--+ | |
Tx <|--+ | | RS-232
| + (GND) | |
Rx >|--+ |--+
| |
| |
+----------------------+
3 Day three
Yesterday I disassembled the box (the photos coming as soon as I find a convenient way to publish them here). The serial port is on the "upper" edge of the board and a five pin plug. It also needs to be bent 90° outwards of the PCB, otherwise the plug won't fit between the PCB and the HDD frame.
As soon as I had my box assembled again, I sat down to build a basic Debian rootfs. Fortunately this isn't hard and is actually quite well documented. I chose the QEMU method, which basicly boils down to issuing three commands. Before you can run the third one, make sure you have set up your binfmtmisc bindings correctly. Otherwise, you won't be able to run ARM binaries on your PC which is actually required to complete the installation of Debian packages.
debootstrap --foreign --arch armel --variant minbase wheezy rootfs cp /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static ./rootfs/usr/bin DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \ DEBCONF_NONINTERACTIVE_SEEN=true \ LC_ALL=C LANGUAGE=C LANG=C \ chroot rootfs /debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage
To make things more funny i decided to use Ansible to manage the configuration of my NAS starting with the playbook for building the rootfs. I will publish it when it's ready.
To be continued…