2 Bit Hacker

So, I decided to go looking for a simple external hard drive enclosure earlier this week, and ended up stumbling across the D-Link DSM-G600 on sale at Best Buy. I’m normally a little skeptical of D-Link products, and usually for good reason, but it’s features sounded neat, and the price wasn’t bad, so I figured I’d take it for a spin.

Setting up the hardware was pretty simple, couple of screws on the back and the top just lifts off. You just snap your hard drive into the tray and connect power and IDE. I wasn’t overly impressed with the cable routing, I figured they probably could have done something better with the IDE cable. I thought it was somewhat interesting that it’s just using a MiniPCI wireless card, which could probably be taken out if I ever wanted to use it in something else.

The software setup, on the other hand, was pretty bad. I had to reboot the unit a few times to get it to even recognize that it had a hard drive, at which point it prompts to format the drive. That went okay, but after formatting, it’s got a button to reboot, which doesn’t actually reboot the unit. After power cycling, it wanted to format again, so I let it. After rebooting again after that, it didn’t recognize the drive again. Then one more reboot till it was finally happy.

I also ran into some issues with file permissions. I had logged in using FTP to create some directories, then used the G600′s web interface to assign Windows shares to them with seperate users. Turns out the user’s couldn’t write to the directories via Windows file sharing. I managed to fix the permissions via FTP, but I was slightly annoyed that it seems to want everything to be mode 777.

Which reminds me, this little thing is definitely running Linux. A strings on the firmware upgrade reveals a ‘Linux-2.4.21-pre4′. The Windows filesharing is being provided by Samba. It makes me wonder how hackable this thing might be. It would be great to be able to load up a custom firmware with a web configurator that doesn’t suck, and maybe NFS and rsyncd support. I haven’t found anything online about hacking it yet, and I’m not really sure where to start. I suspect the firmware upgrade file is just a new flash image for it, probably with a cramfs or similar, but I’m not sure how to try taking it apart. Any pointers would be appreciated.

Overall I’m happy with the box, it gives me a nice simple thing to backup some files onto without having to run a whole PC to do it. I might replace it with a small box running FreeNAS someday. I don’t think I’d curse any friends or family members with the G600′s configuration though.