General NAS-Central Forums

Hi all,

I won a LaCie Network Space in the nas-central 2009-1 competition [0] and I
thought I'd start a forum post to keep track of what I'm doing with it.

As soon as I got it I checked it was working then cracked it open (thanks to
Daan's instructions [1]) and started trying to get a serial console. I found
this on J4:
pin 1: 5V
pin 2: GND
pin 7: RX
pin 8: TX
The TX is 3.3V so RX should be the same. The particular serial level shifter I'm
using seems to output 2.3V when powered from a 5V source and that seems to work,
obviously you should be careful if you use the 5V source to power your own. I
think pins 3-6 are JTAG but I haven't confirmed that yet.

Once I had serial I could interrupt U-Boot. It shows "Waiting for LUMP" and
looking at the sources for similar devices this should be a nice way to get
netconsole for users who don't want to attach a serial cable. Something to look
into later...

With access to a U-Boot I can tftpboot kernel images and have managed to create
a new orion5x board setup file and boot Linux 2.6.30 (ish). The essentials seem
to work and it can boot into an armel debian image mounted over NFS. The big
thing left to check is if SATA works.

So at the moment I'm concentrating on getting the latest Linux kernel booting on
it and then hopefully getting those changes into mainline. I'll try to get some
photos of the board and start a wiki article, I'll update this thread as things
progress.

[0] http://www.nas-central.org/2009-1-competition-results
[1] http://lacie.nas-central.org/wiki/Categ ... g_software

Cheers,

--
Byron Bradley

Cool! I noticed the Network Space was a prize in the NAS hacking competition, so I was expecting an experienced NAS hacker to come up with something for this NAS. And so it happened. You start counting at zero (as the array indices in the C programming language) and your post is full of abbreviations I don't know, but as far as I get it if we're lucky we get Debian running on our Network Space. Pretty cool.

BTW, the instructions for removing the plastic cover were copy-pasted from a post by somebody else, useful to myself too!

That's cool, I've recently got this device being faulty (disk is dead and the old owner didn't seem to care), so I'm trying to at least get a serial connection working, however, I do not get the normal uBoot prompt as I expected (with my EDMini, NS2 and t5325), all I get is:


From here it does not matter what I enter, it won't do anything... I'm familiar with the Lacie nas devices and how to modify them, controlling uBoot and such, but this is new to me... Maybe there is a command I can enter to start uBoot?

I also reconnected everything, but all is wired as documented here and on the Wiki...

I can get to uBoot, I guess that my serial connection sends some signals before connecting it, interrupting the debootstrap process.

When I power on the device and then plug in the USB->TTL adapter, I get uBoot prompt .

BTW, the kernel patches are not available anymore due to convopit not existing anymore. If someone has the patches ready for download (and if the author agrees),I'll put it on my dedi as well.

Ay. Too bad.

Anyway, fvdw mailed me the patches a while ago. I've put them here:
http://downloads.lacie.nas-central.org/ ... 20patches/

for you info

New forum opened for fvdw firmware for Philips SPD8020 and Lacie nwsp vs1.

After closing down convopit we lost a nice place were we could discuss the home "fvdw" firmware for the lacie nwsp vs 1 and Philips spd8020. However a user of the firmware offered us the possibility to open a dedicated forum for this fvdw firmware that can run on the spd8020 and lacie networkspace vs1 (and in future also on network space vs2 is our plan). Setting up the forum has taken some time and delay in the finishing the new release (8-0) but it is close to finalizing.

The forum is setup and will be improved over time hopefully with help of your inputs and feedback.
It is open for anybody that has a question or want to give feedback or download latest versions and more.
The new forum has as url "plugout.net" to make it easy for you click this link the check it out http://plugout.net/index.php

PS The see and access the download forum you need to register, in the download section you can find the latest version of the firmware and other stuff that may be of your interest

rgds, fvdw