foonas weblog http://blog.foonas.org network attached storage, embedded development, news, ramblings Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:50:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 en foobox donation drive http://blog.foonas.org/2008/06/29/foobox-donation-drive/ http://blog.foonas.org/2008/06/29/foobox-donation-drive/#comments Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:48:08 +0000 admin http://blog.foonas.org/?p=31 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!

]]> http://blog.foonas.org/2008/06/29/foobox-donation-drive/feed/ donation drive complete! http://blog.foonas.org/2008/06/28/donation-drive-complete/ http://blog.foonas.org/2008/06/28/donation-drive-complete/#comments Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:51:00 +0000 admin http://blog.foonas.org/?p=26 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!

]]> http://blog.foonas.org/2008/06/28/donation-drive-complete/feed/ foonas.org general update http://blog.foonas.org/2008/06/27/foonasorg-general-update/ http://blog.foonas.org/2008/06/27/foonasorg-general-update/#comments Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:59:43 +0000 admin http://blog.foonas.org/?p=21 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!

]]> http://blog.foonas.org/2008/06/27/foonasorg-general-update/feed/ foonas-em 0.1.0-r2 http://blog.foonas.org/2008/05/05/foonas-em-010-r2/ http://blog.foonas.org/2008/05/05/foonas-em-010-r2/#comments Mon, 05 May 2008 13:02:34 +0000 admin http://blog.foonas.org/2008/05/05/foonas-em-010-r2/ foonas-em 0.1.0-r2 has been released bringing many new features and support for various new platforms. With this move comes a migration from glibc to uclibc to free up space for new features which include JFS, USB storage, Busybox 1.10.1, partial German and Spanish localisations and VFAT support for all platforms.

We are pleased to announce support for various Marvell Orion based devices following the support for these platforms added into Linux 2.6.25 and include 2.6.25.1 in this release for the following Orion based machines:

Visit the foonas wiki for more information on the features for your platform, installation information and download details. Thanks to everyone involved in this release!

]]> http://blog.foonas.org/2008/05/05/foonas-em-010-r2/feed/ nas-central expansion http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/05/nas-central-expansion/ http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/05/nas-central-expansion/#comments Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:19:31 +0000 timtim http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/05/nas-central-expansion/ 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:

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!

]]> http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/05/nas-central-expansion/feed/ donation drive q1 2008 http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/02/donation-drive-q1-2008/ http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/02/donation-drive-q1-2008/#comments Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:59:48 +0000 timtim http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/02/donation-drive-q1-2008/ 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!

]]> http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/02/donation-drive-q1-2008/feed/ foonas-em released http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/01/foonas-em-released/ http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/01/foonas-em-released/#comments Tue, 01 Jan 2008 20:00:55 +0000 timtim http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/02/foonas-em-released/ 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!

]]> http://blog.foonas.org/2008/01/01/foonas-em-released/feed/ foonas-iscsi in 2008 http://blog.foonas.org/2007/12/01/foonas-iscsi-in-2008/ http://blog.foonas.org/2007/12/01/foonas-iscsi-in-2008/#comments Sat, 01 Dec 2007 02:55:48 +0000 timtim http://blog.foonas.org/2007/12/01/foonas-iscsi-in-2008/ 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!

]]> http://blog.foonas.org/2007/12/01/foonas-iscsi-in-2008/feed/ qnap provides ts-109 boards for devs http://blog.foonas.org/2007/11/22/qnap-provides-ts-109-boards-for-developers/ http://blog.foonas.org/2007/11/22/qnap-provides-ts-109-boards-for-developers/#comments Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:36:13 +0000 repvik http://blog.foonas.org/2007/11/22/qnap-provides-ts-109-boards-for-developers/ 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 ;)

]]> http://blog.foonas.org/2007/11/22/qnap-provides-ts-109-boards-for-developers/feed/ i-o data to launch hdl-gs nas range soon http://blog.foonas.org/2007/11/22/i-o-data-to-launch-hdl-gs-nas-range-soon/ http://blog.foonas.org/2007/11/22/i-o-data-to-launch-hdl-gs-nas-range-soon/#comments Thu, 22 Nov 2007 22:10:08 +0000 timtim http://blog.foonas.org/2007/11/22/i-o-data-to-launch-hdl-gs-nas-range-soon/ 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.

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