NAS-CC SAN200 Firmware

This directory contains the NAS-CC SAN200 firmware. This firmware is meant to replace the LinkSys stock firmware.

NAS-CC SAN200 firmware converts your NAS200 into a SAN device that talks ATA over Ethernet protocol.
See Wikipedia for details.

Performance is quite disappointing. This is a limitation of the NAS200 hardware platform.

What this makes it possible to experiment with cluster software like Oracle/RAC or clustered File System. See here for an use case.

It is also makes it possible for Windows to boot from SAN discs.

This Firmware is very limited to SAN functionlity only. As such, it does not even enable TCP/IP (or UDP) protocol, and all the communication is through raw Ethernet Frames.

The NAS-CC boot firmware makes use of an old Buildroot snapshot (2008-08-27). This is included with the source distribution.

Allthough, this buildroot version is quite old, it provides all the functionality needed for SAN functionality.

Package Contents

This is the list of the top-level files

• binaries/ - Where the images are created
• br-XXXXX/ - Created from buildroot-YYYYMMDD.tar.bz2.
• buildroot-YYYYMMDD.tar.bz2 - Snapshot of buildroot.
• dl/ - Contains downloaded source files. Empty until you do your own firmware builds.
• docs/ - Misc documentation.
• extras/ - Extra packages added by NAS-CC to what is already available from buildroot.
• kernel-patches/ - Patches to the stock Linux kernel. They provide the NAS200 platform specifics.
• local/ - buildroot build profiles.
• nas200-misc.mk - Some additional customisations to the root image.
• patches/ - Patches made to buildroot.
• README.txt - this file.
• mk - Utility scripts.
• skel/ - skeleton directories. Used to pre-initialise root images.
• tools/ - Support utilities.
• version.txt - Versioning information

Building from source

Unpack the source tarball. Then enter:

$ ./mk

From the root directory of the unpacked source tarball.

Testing the build

For this you need a working qemu program. Enter:

./mk run boot

This will attempt to run your boot image from qemu.

By default it will qemu user level networking, which is completely useles for Ethernet communcations.

Installing the SAN200 Firmware

BEWARE doing this may brick your NAS200.

Essentially there are two ways of getting NAS-CC on your device. One is using the redboot upgrade utility and the other one is using the upgrade firmware option from the webpage.

The preferred method for upgrading under NAS-CC is by the redboot upgrade utility since NAS-CC does not provide its own method for doing firmware upgrades. That is, if after downgrading to NAS-CC you want to go back to a different firmware you will have to use redboot upgrade to do so.

To upgrade using NAS-CC this software distribution includes a script to put your NAS200 in upgrade mode and the upslug program that is used to flash the firmware.

upslug is a Linux tool. For Windows users, you may want to visit this web site.

Before beginning, you must compile the upslug executable. This can be found in the tools/upslug subdirectory. It is up to you to decide if you want to place upslug in your executable PATH.

These steps must be run as root user:

1. Make sure your NAS200 is off.
2. run the script swupgrade which can be found in the tools/upslug sub-directory.
3. Turn-on your NAS200.
4. The NAS200 should start blinking its power LED orange. Also at this point swupgrade should have printed the word Redboot> and return you to the shell prompt.
5. Run upslug with upslug -f -u firmware.bin. Replace firmware.bin with the name of your firmware file.
6. Follow the prompts.

You can use this procedure to install not only NAS-CC but any firmware that is compatible with the NAS200.

Using NAS-CC SAN200 firmware

The SAN200 firmware only has one function, to provide AoE targets. There is also an admin interface accesible through a Coraid Ethernet Console client.

Simply stated, you boot the system, it will scan the internal SATA drives. If there are any Logical Volumes defined, it will export those.

IF no logical Volumes are defined, it will look for Software RAID devices, and if found export those.

If no Software RAID devices are found, it will look for the partitions of the internal discs. If any are found, these will be exported.

Finally, if no partitions were found, it will export the SATA disc as a whole.

The idea here is that once the SAN200 export the entire disc you can use your local client utilities (GUI based, for instance) to partition the discs and configure LVM or RAID.

Once that is done, you reboot your NAS200 and it will automatically export whatever you configured in there.

You can connect to the Console of the NAS200 with the help of a Coraid Ethernet Console Client. You can find one here:

• Coraid cec
• Linux Ethernet Console

Using SAN200 Firmware with Linux

Most Linux distributions already come with built-in support for ATA over Ethernet. You can follow this instructions to get started:

• Fedora
• Debian Lenny
• Debian Etch

Using SAN200 Firmware with Windows

There is an OpenSource driver for ATA over Ethernet:

• WinAoE

This driver supports network booting with gPXE

Copyright

NAS-CC is Copyright (C) 2008 Alejandro Liu Ly

NAS-CC is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

NAS-CC is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/