Fedora on NSLU2/Synology/etc.

[Peter Lemenkov]

2009/8/30 Pete Zaitcev <zaitcev at redhat.com>:
> Dear All:
>
> I'm wondering if anyone tried to run Fedora on a small home NAS,
> in the class of NSLU2 or Synology 108j. I'm hacking on software
> that permits easy management of storage clouds and I'm thinking
> about creating a testbed populated with something cheap ($100 or so).
> Please let me know if you have a hands-on experience with it.

I advice you to look at the Western Digital MyBook World Edition
series, especially at the latest WD MyBook WE White Light:

http://www.wdc.com/ru/products/Products.asp?DriveID=587
http://www.wdc.com/ru/products/Products.asp?DriveID=589

They have 128 Mb of RAM, 1Gbit ethernet, CPU ~ 300+ MHz and a 1 or 2
SATA2 ports (number of SATA2 ports depends on model). I've got some
experience with previous model (which has only 32 Mbytes of RAM and
less powerful CPU), and it works well. Here is its smolts profile:

http://www.smolts.org/client/show_all/pub_597e2d6d-7d94-4299-a9ae-e7c3a7e35b31

Although they are costs ~200-300 $ (please, note that HDD is already
included, so the actual price is ~100$ + 1 or 2 TB HDD), they are very
hack-friendly, since you don't need to flash/re-flash them (and,
therefore, chances to brick them are very very small). They work as
following:

* After power-up CPU loads tiny firmware, which reads first 512 bytes
from attached HDD, which should contain 1st stage loader, and executes
it.
* 1st stage loader (if it was loaded correctly) loads 2nd stage loader
from the rest of HDD.

All these loaders are easy to install using just the USB-HDD box or
directly attaching HDD to your computer. And you may, also, very
simply (using only dd and bzip2) create a backup of the original
firmware in case you'll gave up :)

Note, that you need to remember your soldering skills since you will
need to attach serial cable (I'm afraid most of consumer's NAS devices
sold without serial or JTAG).

-- 
With best regards, Peter Lemenkov.