I have two new quick projects that I need for my Black Armor NAS 110 in the immediate future.

First I need the UPS functionality for this device as I’m taking power hits at my residence and my old UPS’ are just way too old and not working to keep the NAS running after a power blip. I bought an APC Back-UPS ES BE550G 550 VA 330 Watts at CostCo with one of their specials. The Black Armor NAS documentation said it only works with APC UPS so I thought I was okay but with further reading in the forums they say results vary with APC devices. So time to see if my new APC UPS will work with the built-in software or if the software needs improvements. So I hope to have a smart UPS running but just the dumb UPS functionality without a shutdown mode will have to do if I cannot get it working. The smart UPS depends on apcupsd 3.12.2 according to a post.

$ /usr/sbin/apcupsd --version
apcupsd 3.12.2 (18 January 2006) redhat

Next on the list is to figure out how functional the streaming media works on the device. This will hopefully be more straight forward than the UPS. Family time will be vastly improved if I can get the DVD collection running off this device. DLNA is an interesting subject and my BlueRay player hooked to my TV may be able to play movies off the NAS. That would be optimal.

Here is the beginning of a dump of information on the Black Armor device from the Linux kernel and environment. From this I learned the processor type and features. I also got some pointers to cross-compiler options used. These will all be important later.

I figured out something simple but neat on the Black Armor NAS 110 (BA-NAS110) device. It has rsync a powerful file-system replication tool from UNIX.

Caveats are that in order to do this you must have root on the device and a ssh connection with the command line. I’ll write a friendly doc on how to get ‘root’ later. (Just search for Hajo Noerenberg’s work on the subject sans the friendly write up if you want to do it now.)

So, the BA-NAS110 is capable of using rsync from the command line to replicate its data to another NAS or Linux system if you have root on the system. Getting it setup was simple enough but knowing that the rsync daemon and client were on the systems was the trick.

You have to create a rsyncd.conf file since there isn’t one pre-built. Syntax is common to the typical rsync 3.0.4 version.

I found something fun.

The Seagate NAS (Network Attached Storage) that I’ve been using at my house is running an embedded Linux. A NAS is a big network hard drive you can share between computers. I got a root account on it and have found a whole world of fun that could be done in there. Root is the master administrative account for UNIX systems that let you do extra things beyond the normal.

First steps is getting a functional toolchain and then build some trivial tools. The goal would be to have a full set of GNU tools available in a package format for people to use. I want to publish a full working OpenSSH with scp support and rsync for this thing as a starting point. Maybe add some features for NFS. Just digging around on this thing reminded me how much I enjoy hacking on hardware.