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 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!

nas-central.org today launched their new portal. Previously nas-central was a union of several Buffalo device specific hacking communities, but as of today the nas-central team are creating dedicated spaces for most of the major manufacturers of embedded Linux based devices, including:

• Buffalo
• D-Link
• Iomega
• Lacie
• Linksys
• Maxtor
• Synology
• QNAP
• Thecus
• Zyxel

If you own an embedded Linux based NAS by one of these manufacturers you can help the effort by clicking one of the links above and documenting your device. Also the nas-central team are happy to add support for new manufacturers, hit the nas-central forum with your requests!

The foonas team are proud to announce the first stable release of foonas-em (and indeed the first official release from foonas.org) for PowerPC based Linkstation and Kurobox NAS devices. The foonas-em firmware for these platforms replaces existing vendor and third party firmwares and includes the following features no other in flash firmware provides:

• Linux 2.6.23.12 in flash
• XFS support and well as ext2 and ext3
• Busybox 1.8.2 with a reasonable set of commands
• vsftpd
• Support for editing u-boot configuration from Linux
• Browser based installation of supported OS (currently Gentoo and foonas)

More information on foonas-em can be found via the main foonas portal. Support for other devices is in progress, updates for these will appear as soon as various platform specific issues have been worked out. We hope you enjoy the improvements in this new firmware. Hit the comments and let us know what you think and happy new year from foonas!

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.

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.