NAS-Central & Foonas Weblog

Thanks to a generous donation by Chris Wilson aka gcj we were able to purchase a second Thecus N1200 for Byron Bradley known for his fine work on the Linux kernel for Orion based devices. Thanks again to Chris who has not only helped us finish the first foonas.org donation drive but is now also helping out with Thecus N2100 support and foonas-iscsi!

News on the next donation drive will appear in the near future, watch this space!

Thanks to your kind donations team foonas has taken delivery of a Thecus N1200 – this would not have been possible without your support, so thanks again! We are still collecting donations for the Q1 donation drive to get a device for foonas developer Byron Bradley, so if you want to help foonas in a non technical manner hit up the donations page and pop us a few bucks!

Currently team foonas is focusing on finishing off the localisation in foonas-em and full on foonas-iscsi development. News about new releases and development will follow soon! Recently foonas.org got a small mention in an article at the embedded Linux news site Linux Devices thanks to Markus from nas-central.org, champion of the GPL who also got slashdotted recently in his mission to acquire sources for the Hammer MyShare NAS. You can follow his quest on the nas-central.org blog!

A Debian rootfs for testing/general use is now available – see this topic in the Buffalo forums for more info on the LS Pro and this article in the Buffalo wiki for the Kurobox Pro.

A while ago while searching for other NAS hacking communities I started to download and request GPL sources for various NAS devices (see gpl.nas-central.org). For those devices without available GPL sources and without any positive feedback from the the manufacturer (read my first post at the gpl-violations.org) lists I started to investigate if it is possible to disassemble the firmwares to proove a GPL violation.

With the help of gotnas I succeeded in creating a script for disassembling the firmware of the Hammer Myshare, a NAS also based on the Marvell Orion SoC. I uploaded the script to the nas-central.org downloadsection and posted instructions about how to disassemble the firmware and how to mount the initrd at the gpl-violations.org lists so it is easily possible to verify the GPL violations (read my second post at gpl-violations.org).

After a while when nothing happened I decided to notify the busybox developers (busybox.net) and linuxdevices.org about the posts and an article was featured instantly (NAS hackers allege GPL violation). A few days later the Software Freedom Law Center announced that it has filed two new copyright infringement lawsuits on behalf of the busybox developers Rob Landley and Erik Andersen against Bell Microproducts, Inc. & Super Micro Computer, Inc (SFLC Files Another Round of GPL Violation Lawsuits on Behalf of BusyBox Developers , linux-watch.com story).

Seems like it wasn`t wasted time

A forum member has kindly posted instructions on how-to install Debian Lenny to the TS Pro II here in the buffalo forums.