foonas weblog

QNAP has kindly offered to provide two TurboStation TS-109 boards for the foonas developers. As a very few clued-in people might know, QNAP’s excellent PowerPC-based TurboStation TS-101 was the NAS-device that started foonas development. And now they’re doing it again. The TS-109 looks like another well-designed device, and they’re sending us two of them with console attached. Kudos to QNAP for helping us!

UPDATE: We got a couple of TS-209 boards instead of TS-109. We don’t complain of course

Debuting in Japan in mid December is the new HDL-GS line of NAS devices from I-O Data. Among its many features are GBit ethernet, disk sizes ranging from 250 GB to 1 TB, an iTunes music server, DNLA compliant media streamer and OS X client as well as Windows.

Another worthy feature of note is its ability to copy photos from a digital camera via USB, which are manageable by a nice web based interface. Oh yes, it has a pretty looking case too.

So looks like it has all the standard features you’d expect from a good consumer NAS device, but what’s inside it? Is this one going to make it outside of Japan? Currently it seems there is zero information about its hardware available, but we’d guess it might be running Linux like its cousin the GLAN Tank.

More thanks are in order for Kaiten at NAS-Central.org for providing a MIPSel based Linkstation HD-HLAN to enable us to support this platform. In conjunction with the other PowerPC based HD-HLAN & HG-HLAN devices in our possession (one of which was also donated by NAS-Central) we are now able to target all of the original hackable Buffalo Linkstations, Kurobox  & Kurobox HG.

Thanks to the guys at NAS-Central again!

Big thanks to Buffalo Technology Europe and NAS-Central for each providing a Kurobox Pro for foonas development. These kind donations have been key in developing initial foonas support for this device and other current LinkStation devices produced by Buffalo due to be supported in foonas soon.

Thanks again!

In Apples OS X Leopard out of the box it is not possible to use AFP shares from Linux based storage devices with its main new feature, Time Machine. We were really disappointed with this since this functionality featured in various pre-release versions of 10.5, especially with all the NAS devices we have sitting around! Cue Engadget for tip of the day! Open a terminal and enter the following command:


  defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1


Bingo! Hit Time Machine in System Preferences to configure your mac to use your NAS for a good sweet backup. Enjoy!

Various developers at Marvell are aiming to get support for various Orion SoC based platforms included in the mainline vanilla Linux kernel and have just published a git repository of work so far. This will hopefully have a significant impact on NAS hacking communities with the popularity of this hardware in currently available devices, many of whom have been stuck with old vendor specific code for some time.

In terms of foonas this will bring improved support for the Kurobox Pro initially with various ARM based Buffalo Linkstations to follow.

This weekend the entire foonas.org portal was moved to Oregon State University Open Source Labs rack-space. With the move comes a new Mantis bug tracker, working email services for websites and a new weblog to serve the community delivering up to date foonas development information.

Thanks also go to the NAS communities for making room on the box particularly our infrastructure manager ka6sox for the initial setup, NAiL for hosting and managing foonas.org initially and also Oregon State University for hosting our communities in the first place.