NAS-Central & Foonas Weblog

We updated a few bits this week:

• New shiny icons for the Buffalo and General forums
• Added a new forum for the Zyxel NSA-210
• Upgraded this blog and plugins
• Added icons for the Zyxel and Lacie sub-forums
• New sub-forum for kernel dev on Kirkwood based Buffalo NAS

To allow for a more centralised and simple method of reporting news to the NAS-Central wikis we have made some changes to the news system for the wiki front pages:

• News from all wikis moved to blog and categorised
• We made a custom RSS feed merger that runs hourly to build the news feed
• Wiki feeds each contain NAS-Central, NAS Community News the and manufacturer specific category for that wiki
• We wrote a MediaWiki plugin that works the way we want it to to display it!

If you want to report news subscribe to this blog so you have an account then contact us!

Today we are announcing that foonas.org will be joining NAS-Central officially. This will mean the following changes over the coming months:

• Sites and services reorganised across servers (ie where they are hosted) for better security and lower management overhead
• foonas blog merged into the NAS-Central blog
• Possibly merge the bug trackers
• NAS-Central will be providing git access for developers
• foonas.org git will be moved to NAS-Central repo
• foonas forum area at the general NAS-Central forums

Apart from these changes foonas.org and NAS-Central sites and domains will remain as is. NAS-Central is happy to welcome any useful resource to our communities!

The 2009-1 competition came to an end this weekend! Following receiving some fine entries and the results coming in from you, the community and a panel of senior judges from NAS-Central we have decided the winners.

Many thanks to all those who took part and all the hard work you put in. Check out the results page in the main portal for more information!

A while ago while searching for other NAS hacking communities I started to download and request GPL sources for various NAS devices (see 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 when 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

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.

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.