New chap, Eminent NAS, PLX 7821

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New chap, Eminent NAS, PLX 7821

Postby pulchism » Mon Sep 08, 2014 12:51 pm

Hi all,

I'm new to the forum.

Bought a shoddy shoddy shoddy NAS, Eminent EM4172, doesn't work. Its a PLX NAS7821 based device seemingly.

I'm looking forward to figuring out how to get basic functionality out of the box by installing arch.

I see lots of posts in 2011/12 for PLX problems, but it seems to go dry after that. If anyone wants to volunteer a few links or other to help get me up to speed, it would be very much welcome.

Tally ho!


http://www.eminent-online.com/en/product/1281/em4172-myisharing-nas.html
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Re: New chap, Eminent NAS, PLX 7821

Postby WarheadsSE » Mon Sep 08, 2014 2:37 pm

Yup, that looks like an oxnas alright. There has been a recent slew of "new to us" devices. In theory, there should be a way to get the necessary information out of the mfg's GPL tarball (kernel) to create a Device Tree file and necessary u-boot changes, but it will prove interesting.
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Re: New chap, Eminent NAS, PLX 7821

Postby pulchism » Tue Sep 09, 2014 8:34 am

Well I'll try everything I find posted so far regarding booting from sata. I have a lot to learn about how linux works at this level anyhoo.

By mfg I suppose you mean "Avago technologies", formerly "PLXTECH"? Do you think such a tarball be part of "the PLX SDK", and do you think it is available to joseph public? I guess this SDK is what the final manufacturer (Eminent) used to flash the NAND and build their <insert colourful adjective here> unreliable software.

Actually in general I wonder what kind of information suppliers such as Eminent are legally obliged to furnish by open source licenses and so on. It nearly broke their hearts to tell me the hardware is "PLX", everything else is a state secret.
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Re: New chap, Eminent NAS, PLX 7821

Postby WarheadsSE » Tue Sep 09, 2014 2:36 pm

Well they are required to re-release any modifications to uboot and the kernel. They are not required to make anything that is PLX specific (and thus actually trade secret) available to the public.

The good news is that if we can glean what is going on, we can reproduce it at this point thanks to the efforts of those in the ALARM and Debian community.
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Re: New chap, Eminent NAS, PLX 7821

Postby pulchism » Fri Sep 26, 2014 3:02 pm

Eminent refuse point blank to redistribute any modified source code.

The best they would do is list all of the packages they based their build on - they are taken mostly from Fedora 12 and using the 2.6.31 version of the linux kernel. I can list them if its of interest to anyone...

The odd thing (for me at least) is most of the core pacakages (bash for example) end in "armv5tel" but the customised kernel is labelled with "armv6l" (in full: "Linux isharing 2.6.31.14-fast-20110801-fan #41 SMP Fri Oct 14 10:05:59 CST 2011 armv6l")


I found a naughty way of gaining root access over ftp to the NAS. So I can poke around the file system, and will try an enable ssh for a start (I think its firewalled out somehow).

Probably an experienced Linux person could crack this nut pretty quick!
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Re: New chap, Eminent NAS, PLX 7821

Postby WarheadsSE » Fri Sep 26, 2014 4:55 pm

They are legally bound to release the kernel and uboot sources. GPL baby.

armv6l - this only applies to the processor type. There is little if any benefit to recompiling armv5te instruction set code to armv6* unless it has a vfp, which the oxnas does not.
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