THE SPEW - Land where drunk cows swim and home to my daily hand...
streaming media & music | Home | Archives | Albums | Pics

NS 347 NAS LAN Disk - excellent firmware for the RDC2882 chipset

28 March, 2008 00:26

A little more than a year ago, I blogged about my NS-347 NAS LAN Disk, and my inability to utilize any of the features of the SMB and FTP built in services, and that the connectivity issues were weak and almost unusable.

After trying a couple third party firmware software systems, I decided it would make for a better USB external drive instead, mainly because of the aluminum casing and the ability to format a ext3 file system - also making the NAS capabilities unusable.

About 6 months ago I formated the drive with a FAT file system so that I could have a portable large storage device.

I mostly forgot about the networking aspect of the machine, until I found a firmware update in which currently allows me password protected windows (SMB) folder shares, and username & password FTP accounts, including public FTP access to a designated folder.

For the last couple of days after updating the firmware, I have decided to keep it on the LAN permanantly, as the dependability is now solid enough to use for both personal, and personal project type storage application needs.

Trying to find the IP address I set a year and a half ago was pretty easy.  I used tcpdump -i ethX -vvv, set a snap-length of 3500, and discovered the UDP SMB advertisements of the shares I set way back then, and with that the IP I had set on the network of that time.

So now I had the IP, but damn if I could remember the password I had set for the machine.

Documentation for the NS-347 is not centralized, so it took me a bit to figure out how to reset the firmware configuration.

The first thing I did was look inside the casing on the bread board for a reset button, and I could not find one.  I later read on a forum that their was, quite indeed, a button on that board.

I took another look, and by god I found it.  That button is damn small, and looks more like small chip, like a power regulator, or resistor.

In order to reset the device to its default settings, you must hold down the button while powering up the system - holding for about 10 to 15 seconds while it boots its operating system.  I had to give this firmware a shot.

The default IP for the LAN disk is  169.254.0.1, with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 - how strange.  I set my ethernet device to an IP on that network address, fired up my browser, and received a login / password prompt.

The default username and password for the NS-347 is admin / admin.

I didn't even play around, knowing quite well the last third party replacement was just as cheap as the factory default firmware, so I immediately update the device.

I have tried NAS-BASIC 47, and I was not happy with it, switched, and now I updated to 48, with the same boot loader, hoping I could maintain some productive usability with it.

Once the firmware was updated, I was overjoyed to see that you could set per folder passwords on Windows File Shares.  No ability for custom usernames however.

Next I realized that I could now set both username and passwords for FTP folders, read write permissions, along with the options of enabling public FTP on a specific folder, and changing the default FTP TCP port.

I quickly moved to the testing faze.  SMB shares, which were once unusable for more than single access, one file per session transfers, now has the ability to support sessions with multiple access to the file system.  At this point I was pretty much sold on keeping it on the LAN, instead of a USB drive.

FTP access is great for providing WAN access, as the software has the ability of using both a username and password of 12 characters per account.  Do a dd on /dev/urandom, and you have a quite secure FTP server in which I feel comfortable putting on the WAN side of my network for several projects of mine in which I need to exchange data.  In the past, I have always used sftp, scp, or netcat (nc) from my remote sites.

You can set a private static IP for the NAS, or use DHCP to retrieve network information.  It also has a built in DHCP server which I have no use for.

You may also set a hostname for internal DNS, and a group name for workgroups.

Another nice feature is it's built in NTP client in which you have the ability to update the date and time from any time server you choose, for filesystem accounting information.

It now has all sorts of application possibilities on my quite active home network.

The RDC firmware version mentions wget access, however not accessible, so this port also probably has hidden abilities that one might find hacking the firmware binary.

NAS-BASIC48 can be found at this link: http://www.aroundmyroom.com/landisk found ON THIS blog post from the author at aroundmyroom.com.  You will love the background image!

A year ago I was writing:

Yahoo! ups the anti with mail storage to infinity, and beyond?

Cobalt RAQ 1 and the devilish debian-mipsel 'net down' bug

[Technology] [Software] [Projects]
[Comments(0)] [Trackbacks(0)] [Permalink]

Add comment

Add comment
 authimage
Your E-Mail Address will NOT be Shared

Main Entry: spew
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English spIwan; akin to Old High German spIwan to spit, Latin spuere, Greek ptyein intransitive verb
1 : VOMIT
2 : to come forth in a flood or gush
3 : to ooze out as if under pressure : EXUDE transitive verb
1 : VOMIT
2 : to send or cast forth with vigor or violence or in great quantity -- often used with out - spew-er noun
-- Merriam-Webster

Land where drunk cows swim and home to my daily hand