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Alejandro Liu

CentOS 5 on NAS200

The following scripts are used to bootstrap CentOS 5 on to a NAS200.

While this gives the NAS200 the full functionality of a full-blown
Linux distribution, it can be at times painfully slow.

Requirements

  1. A Filesystem image.
  2. A NAS200 replacement firmware (NASCC boot)
  3. Familarity with using Linux. (That is the whole point!)
  4. USB key.

Preparing a USB key

For this to work, your USB key should be formatted with a Linux File
system (so no VFAT), like ext2/3 or xfs.

For ext3, use these commands:

mke2fs -j -L "rootfs" /dev/USB-device
tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 /dev/USB-device

It is important to use the rootfs label as the default root file
system will use that to locate the root partition.

Create the root file system use:

mount /dev/USB-device /mnt
cd /mnt
tar jxvf <path-to-root-fs-tarball>.bz2
cd
umount /mnt

That's all there is to it.

Booting it for the first time

  1. Insert the USB key in one of the NAS200 USB ports.
  2. Make sure you are running nascc-boot.
  3. Turn on your NAS200
  4. If you are using the binary distribution, it will take a long time
    before you are able to log-in due to the fact that the NAS200 is
    generating the three openssh keys that it needs to function,
  5. By default it will use DHCP to configure eth0.
  6. Log-on using ssh root@nas-device. The default password is
    admin.
  7. IMPORTANT Configure swap. Remember, this thing only has 32MB of RAM.
    You should be able to use the swap device used by the original
    firmware by adding the correct line to /etc/fstab and then
    running swapon -a.
  8. The first thing you should run after activating swap is:
    yum update.

Miscellaneous notes

As you can imagine, this is a very slow system. So don't expect any
performance gains. However, this is a fully functional CentOS
system.

The bare image is 343M, so the only built-in functionality is
to be able to log-in using ssh and to run yum. Of course, you can now
do yum install pkg to install whatever hits your fancy.

If you are using my nascc boot firmware you will have the original
firmware file system under the /pivot directory. This means, you
can run its utilities by doing for example:

chroot /pivot <cmd>

So you can do things like:

chroot /pivot nasctl beep

To sound a beep. What is more useful is that you can find the booting
kernel loadable modules under /pivot/lib/modules.

Ethernet Console

The NAS-CC firmware comes with a Coraid Ethernet Console compatible
network console.
The Ethernet console can
be used during the boot process, so it is possible to connect to the
console and do any FSCK type operations in case the CentOS boot
sequence runs into trouble.

In order to use the Ethernet Console you need to install the client:

  • cec: Coraid Ethernet Console (client)
    AoE Tools
  • cec HowTo
  • A client for the Ethernet console can be found here:
    lec

See Also

Further information and source releases can be found
here

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