nas central weblog

A while ago while searching for other NAS hacking communities i started to download and request GPL sources for various NAS devices (check gpl.nas-central.org). For those devices without available GPL sources and without any positive feedback from the the manufacturer (read my first post at the gpl-violations.org) lists i started to investigate if it is possible to disassemble the firmwares to proove a GPL violation. With the help of gotnas i succeeded in creating a script for disassembling the firmware of the Hammer Myshare, a NAS also based on the Marvell Orion SoC. I uploaded the script to the nas-central.org downloadsection and posted instructions about how to disassemble the firmware and how to mount the initrd at the gpl-violations.org lists so it is easily possible to verify the GPL violations (read my second post at gpl-violations.org). After a while where nothing happened i decided to notify the busybox developers (busybox.net) and linuxdevices.org about the posts and an article was featured instantly(NAS hackers allege GPL violation). A few days later the Software Freedom Law Center announced that it has filed two new copyright infringement lawsuits on behalf of the busybox developers Rob Landley and Erik Andersen against Bell Microproducts, Inc. & Super Micro Computer, Inc (SFLC Files Another Round of GPL Violation Lawsuits on Behalf of BusyBox Developers , linux-watch.com story).

Seems like it wasn`t wasted time

There will be a Server Maintainence window from 20:00-22:00UTC 02/05/08 that will incude some Hardware upgrades.

During that time any or all of the following services will be unavailable:

wiki
subversion
trac
forum

ka6sox (for the nas-central.org infrastructure team)

After moving the buffalo forums to the new place it was time to make the wiki authentication independent from the buffalo forums.

Therefore a new forum at

• http://forums.nas-central.org/

was created. Notice that forumsections for HP, Iomega, Lacie, Netgear and Zyxel were created as these vendors do not have any user driven forums for their boxes. I added one for Linksys so EFG250/NAS200 owners have a place for discussion as well.

The main reasons for creating this forums are:

• Hardware mods (serial/jtag/…) can be investigated & discussed in the hardware sections
• In the kernel development section it can be discussed how to create support for SoC X/Board design Y in the vanilla kernel independent from the special hardware. Many boxes share the same SoC (Marvell orion, Storlink gemini)

Read the announcement here.

Following this poll it is clear that the majority wants the buffalo forum to be integrated with buffalo.nas-central.org and not moved away again from nas-central.org. The forum currently just is in the wrong place at forum.nas-central.org (same for the downloads), the forum is no general forum for nas-central.org (which possibly is needed later for linking subwiki authentication together). Thats why this is happening on the 25 February 2008.

Start: 1600 UTC

End: 2100 UTC

Notice that login in all the subwikis is affected as authentication of all subwikis (except the buffalo one) is linked to the forum database.

EDIT: Forum + downloadsection moved successfully.

Unfortunately it took longer than expected but everything now works again. See this thread for more info.

Yesterday the server was down for some hours. Reason for that was a problem with UDEV on the XEN-server. After reboot it seems that all services for foonas.org / nas-central.org are back online. In case you notice any problems please report back in this thread.

blog & wikis & forums will be accessable but everything will be read only.

Reason: Work on SQL-replication on a different server so we can switch all public facing sites to the redundant server within minutes and the chance is minimized to loose any data if a severe unrecoverable hdd crash happens on the server. If it works as expected this pushes data security to the next level.

Start: 2200UTC 21Jan08

Expected End: 0300UTC 22Jan08

Take a look at the Wiki Syntax Cheatsheet. This feature is very helpful for editors.

Now we have two new subwikis:

• HP Devices
• WesternDigital Devices

Both links are added on the navigation bar on the right.

All Users that own a Netgear NAS look at

• Netgear Devices
  

Its linked on the right side like everything else.

Just before the maintainance we added 2 new wikis for zyxel and thecus NAS-devices.

• Thecus Devices
• Zyxel Devices

Remember that all wikis are editable anonymously, but in case we have to turn that off you only need to register once in the forum at http://forum.nas-central.org and you can login in all wikis with your forum user/pass.