2 Bit Hacker

I often have a number of projects floating around in my head that I’d like to get done around the apartment. Largely for my own tracking, I’ve decided to list them here, roughly in the order I’d like to get them done.

1. Home Server: For a while now I’ve been wanting to build a NAS box for the apartment. A place to backup all my important files from other systems so I don’t have to worry about what I’m losing when I randomly decided to format and reinstall my OS. I was originally thinking of reusing an older Mini-ITX board I have kicking around, giving it a SATA controller and a few large hard drives. I’ve also wanted to do my own router for the apartment. I’m currently using a Linksys WRT54g running dd-wrt, which works fine, but I’d like more control. I think the most economical solution is to combine the two projects into a single Home Server, probably running FreeBSD. It’ll need at least 2 network interfaces, and preferably 4 or more SATA channels. I could easily reuse one of the 5 or so motherboard I have kicking around the apartment, as I don’t need a ton of CPU power or memory. Software wise, just the normal file sharing stuff, NFS, Samba, a web server, maybe look into WebDAV.
2. HTPC: I’d still like to get a Home Theater PC hooked up. I tried this a few years ago without much luck, but now that I have a TV with HDMI inputs, it should be nice and easy. I originally wanted to do this with MythTV, but I think I’ve cooled on that. I think it’ll actually run Windows, primarily for the ability to play streaming Netflix.
3. Replace Desktop: Now that a couple of guys at work have eee PCs I’ve been reconsidering my own systems. I rarely use my desktop at home anymore (perhaps repurpose it to HTPC?) so I’ve been tossing around the idea of replacing the desktop and my ThinkPad T43 with a heftier laptop, like a T61 or an ASUS G1S. Basically, a laptop decent enough to game on if I feel like it. Then pick up an eee to use for portability and quick things like checking e-mail or fixing stuff for work. The Nokia n800 works pretty well for the latter things currently, but the lack of keyboard hurts a bit. And the eee PC is a plain x86 CPU, so I could run XP on it and be able to use Slingbox, which would be nice.
4. Car PC: Yeah, still keeping this dream alive. Some day I’ll build it. It seems to be getting easier though. Bluetooth GPS, Bluetooth serial adapter on the OBD2. Maybe someone will figure out how to hack into the Prius MFD by then.

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.