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[Parsely]

Not a lot of free time since the family tragedy, but usually, I spend it doing various experiments on getting consumer grade network and computer hardware to do things the manufacturer does not intend, but that the devices are capable of doing.

My latest victim is a WD-MyCloud NAS box. (single bay, generation 2 model)  It has the software RAID driver baked into the kernel, so I was doing experiments on how to get it to setup and use software RAID over USB as my latest project.

Future projects include getting it to function as an iSCSI target host, and pals. (Since it ALSO has the iSCSI modules baked into the firmware, they just dont get loaded.)

The web-based administration dashboard for it seems to be a "conserved" project for several other NAS devices offered by WD, some that overlap with the small business target sector, that DO have those functions enabled. I am going to flowchart all the magic scripting they use (Some byzantine combination of PHP, Javascript, and perl based CGI-BIN invocations.. Blech.) to determine which systems have what features turned on, and how they do them, so that I can create a manually patched version that enables all the goodies on the cheap consumer grade single-drive version I have. (I can use redundant disk stores on USB3, which the unit supports.)  It's gonna take a while to do that, due both the complication of the system (all the JS is stuffed into a folder with like, 50 scripts in it doing various things), and due to recent.. events.

If you made videos about this I'd watch the crap out of it. In general I want to know more about what you know about this sort of thing.

[wierd]

Unless seeing me lounge on my couch with a black SSH console session running, with me prodding the system various ways sounds interesting to watch-- I really don't see how it would be appealing to other people.

Really, most people have the attention span of a goldfish, and need to have a planned demo presented instead of seeing live diagnostic and testing of undocumented "features" of a consumer appliance.   EG, "In this video, I show you how to make this device do XYZ" rather than "Day 6 log-- let's play with the md driver baked into this thing's kernel-- Oh fun, the automounter wont let go of partition 1 on the USB device, even though it never mounted it, and cannot mount it, because it is an empty raid container. Awesome. Let's spend 30 minutes trying to get it to let go of the partition without success, and finally continue with a compromise by giving it the finger with a 1kb dummy partition 1 at the start of the drive it can hug and squeeze and name George, while I actually continue my experiments on the md driver..."

The second one might be more entertaining to watch as it would feature my using profanity, and trying various console fu to make it let go, but only for a very select subset of possible viewers.

and YES-- you CAN create additional software raid arrays on the device, and use them-- Including complex RAID if you want. (you can nest software raid arrays, since the inputs are block devices, which the outputs happen to also be.   EG, you can make two raid 5 arrays, function in a raid 1 configuration to each other, etc.)

There's a trick to it of course, because the default firmware does not really WANT to create new arrays using just the mdadm tool, like happens on a normal box... you have to send some magic script fu to the /sys interface for the md driver to FORCE it to allocate a new blank array for every array you wish to create or re-assemble, but it DOES work. Tested.

Maybe once I have this thing all figured out and charted, I will make a custom firmware for it and call it the "MyBitch" firmware or something. LOL

[TheBiggerFish]

Unless seeing me lounge on my couch with a black SSH console session running, with me prodding the system various ways sounds interesting to watch-- I really don't see how it would be appealing to other people.

Really, most people have the attention span of a goldfish, and need to have a planned demo presented instead of seeing live diagnostic and testing of undocumented "features" of a consumer appliance.   EG, "In this video, I show you how to make this device do XYZ" rather than "Day 6 log-- let's play with the md driver baked into this thing's kernel-- Oh fun, the automounter wont let go of partition 1 on the USB device, even though it never mounted it, and cannot mount it, because it is an empty raid container. Awesome. Let's spend 30 minutes trying to get it to let go of the partition without success, and finally continue with a compromise by giving it the finger with a 1kb dummy partition 1 at the start of the drive it can hug and squeeze and name George, while I actually continue my experiments on the md driver..."

The second one might be more entertaining to watch as it would feature my using profanity, and trying various console fu to make it let go, but only for a very select subset of possible viewers.

and YES-- you CAN create additional software raid arrays on the device, and use them-- Including complex RAID if you want. (you can nest software raid arrays, since the inputs are block devices, which the outputs happen to also be.   EG, you can make two raid 5 arrays, function in a raid 1 configuration to each other, etc.)

There's a trick to it of course, because the default firmware does not really WANT to create new arrays using just the mdadm tool, like happens on a normal box... you have to send some magic script fu to the /sys interface for the md driver to FORCE it to allocate a new blank array for every array you wish to create or re-assemble, but it DOES work. Tested.

Maybe once I have this thing all figured out and charted, I will make a custom firmware for it and call it the "MyBitch" firmware or something. LOL

This sounds cool and I would like to see more of it.

[wierd]

I really dont see how this would appeal to non-nerds though, and even then, only to a very select type of nerd...

To me, I just have .... issue... with devices that come with hobbles on straight from the factory.

For reference, the Gen2 single bay MyCloud has a dual core ARM v7/Cortex A9 Marvell Armada 375 clocked at ~1ghz, sporting 512mb of system RAM, a USB3 port, and a Gigabit ethernet port. It comes with a single WD-RED series hard drive, typically spinning at 5400 RPM.

EG, aside from lacking a GPU, and instead having several TB of storage, it is about as powerful as a typical smartphone from a few years ago.

Fun facts:  Once you enable SSH on the thing using the web interface, it DOES respond to rsync over ssh, meaning you can fully automate backups to/from the thing-- and does so with no other configuration tweaking besides just turning SSH on in the settings panel. (Not documented!)  It *ALSO* can run rsync in Daemon mode, but it has some very peculiar configuration stuff it does with rsync in daemon mode, with config files created on the fly by the web UI that it wont let you easily modify persistently that make it hard to use with a normal computer. (rsync over ssh is effortless though.)

Sadly, it is NOT powerful enough to host a minecraft server. I already tried.  It could probably host a number of other game engine servers though. PvPGN would likely run just fine, for instance. Likely OpenTibia server would as well. (Assuming ZRAM is baked in)  I am sure there are others that would be amenable to a box of this class.

Ultimately, I want to figure out how to compile a custom kernel for it, so that I can build all the optional drivers as modules, and figure out a way to make it use USB3 based gigabit ethernet dongles as additional interfaces to create a virtual aggregated link over. This would greatly increase its utility as a network attached storage, assuming it was properly plugged into a properly configured switch. It could handle *A LOT* more connected users that way-- as well as properly set up and use software RAID on the USB3 port. (Use both using a hub)  I could use it to host local SAN storage (iscsi targets) for some virtual servers and the like that way. Bake in the (Seriously, why is it missing!?) zram module for compressed ram swap, etc.

It is really a pretty powerful little box for the pricetag. (about 130$). It just has so many arbitrarily imposed restrictions baked in that it makes me very sad-- and it compels me to break down those restrictions and make it possible to do all the fun things I think I should be able to do with it.

That tends to be how this gets started-- I buy something because I need some specific functionality (In this case, I wanted to have a local alternative to netflix with my Roku-- which the box does out of the box, as it has Twonky media server installed by default), and then I start wondering-- what all.. *ELSE*.. can it do? 

Then I start the experiments.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Playing ToME4, reading Reddit and spending far too much time talking to "feminist" trolls, and trying to convince myself to continue my journal.