foonas weblog

Team foonas has always been a little disappointed with the higher end consumer NAS devices. Costing as much as a laptop or a full desktop system these devices are rarely able to offer little more than basic storage capabilities at a rather significant price out the box. We are looking to develop a community supported open platform comparable in price but superior in features in our new experiment, the foobox project!

We seek funding to purchase the hardware for evaluation and development of the foobox platform, which will also help us with the first version of foonas for the x86 architecture in our Q3 donation drive. Visit the foonas donations page to offer your support!

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!

foonas.org is currently conducting a donation drive to obtain new development hardware. The network used for developing and testing foonas has run out of ethernet ports, and we are seeking to alleviate that problem temporarily and support a new NAS device at the same time by purchasing some Thecus N1200s, a NAS device with a built in switch.

Hit the foonas donations page to donate by paypal, thanks for helping foonas!

Today we are able to confirm that we are commencing work on a dedicated iSCSI target distribution called foonas-iscsi. This will be similar to foonas-em in size and reside in firmware on supported devices. Currently it is in very early stages of development, more information will be made available as this progresses!

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

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!

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.