Lacie ethernet big disk hack

In the on position the device is powered-up and cannot be switched off via software. In the auto position the device can be controlled by the front button and via software. In the off position the device is off, as you can guess. I tried to install LaCie Network Assistant 1. I was unable to run the Windows version of the program both under Wine and under Qemu.

LaCie Network Assistant allows to wake-up a device, discover LaCie devices on the local network, configure IP address and automatically mount shares via smb protocol. It is not a very impressive software, sometimes it crashes too. You can live without it. Both hacks do not require skrewdrivers. Notice 1 : when this hack is active, do not change the configuration of shares: you risk to erase their contents. Once you hacked the root filesystem as you wish see below , reload the original configuration.

Notice 2 : this hack is temporary. Do not change them from the web interface, just upload the original configuration file. This is due a bug in the LaCie code, which does not properly sanitize the modified configuration file and save a corrupted version of it. The web interface runs with root privileges, so it is possible to modify system files by browsing the share contents and using the upload function.

LaCie operating system does not use the traditional sysvinit to start the services on boot, it uses the initng replacement. The ssh daemon is already installed in the LaCie d2 Network, but it does not start automatically. To start sshd - the very first time be prepared to wait some minutes for host keys generation - run:.

Once started, you can add sshd to the list of services to start automatically, and initialize the lastlog :. Here the full dmesg output. It reports some useful info and can be used to write some configuration to the device, see below. The S. Here you can always find the original version of each configuration and system file. The unionfs is assembled in this way:. The Wake-On-Lan function works when the device is turned off but the power switch is on the auto position: sending a Magic packet will power-up the LaCie.

The etherwake 8 program does not work, while wakeonlan 1 does. May be the difference is that etherwake uses raw Ethernet packet, while wakeonlan encapsulate the Magic packet into an UDP packet.

Connect the Ethernet cable before the power cable, otherwise the Wake-On-Lan will not work. We can install a full-featured Debian distribution on this LaCie NAS, the processor requires a Debian armel architecture, do not use the old one arm. The armel is very much faster in floating point operations, with or without an FPU. Our goal is to install a full Debian system and use it in dual boot with the original system. In my case making it cylinders smaller , leaves room for a new partition of about 1 Gb.

We use debootstrap 8 on a standard Linux box. We need to specify the target architecture armel , which is different from the hosting one i or whatever. We ask to perform the unpack phase of bootstrapping only, the rest will be executed on the LaCie. We can switch to this Debian environment using chroot 8 and execute the rest of debootstrap :.

To exit from the chroot environment, stop all the services you have started and execute exit. We will use the original kernel and the original root filesystem to bootstrap.

The original bootstrap sequence is like this:. Do not forget to copy kernel modules into the new partition. This is the part that we added put it after section 4, at line in our case :. At the next reboot, the system will boot into our new Debian system. For an added safety this will be done only once : the flag file is removed just before switching rootfs. If something goes wrong we can power-cycle and restart with the original LaCie system.

Most important files contained herein:. When the power switch is in the auto position, it is necessary to set in advance the required action halt or reboot executed by the shutdown 8 command, traditional flags -P and -r are ignored. On the back it has a rocker switch with three positions: on , auto and off.

The big LED on the front panel is normally steady blue. To change the LED status run a command like this:. To associate an action to the button press it is the snapshot function on the original system , just execute:. Vanilla 2. It lacks also the ability to program the GPIO 24, required to ignore the power-off switch. So it is impossible to control the shutdown via software. The rocker switch, when switched to off, will power off the device, this is different from the behaviour with the LaCie kernel, where a soft reboot is started.

Thanks to Simon Guinot , there is a patch for kernel 2. Notice that BLUE led path is canged. It is possible to control the power-off behaviour using GPIO 24 , setting this pin to 1 will activate the ignore power-off status , thus enabling the software to catch the event and initiate a clean shutdown. Here are the commands required to activate GPIO programming and setting the value to With the input-events 8 command provided by the input-utils package it is possible to monitor the button events:.

How to react to input events? So we need to set this flag before doing an halt or a reboot to obtain the correct behaviour. To obtain an halt , write a 0 at offset 6, to obtain a reboot write 1 at the same offset:. With a proper kernel 2. This is what I know about its content:. Removing the four screws from the back, you can remove the front and the back panels. Removing other two screws from the bottom, the hard disk with the attached PCB will slide out from the aluminium body.

It is possible to have a boot prompt without using the serial port see below. The boot loader U-Boot waits some time before booting, for a special Lacie UDP magic packet see the message Waiting for LUMP on the serial console , if it receives it from an host, it will enter a special remote console, communicating on port UDP. You need the NetConsole client called clunc.

I downloaded the Clunc source code from the Git repository and compiled it just with make. You need also the nc command from the netcat-traditional package. Start the clunc program on your Linux box and power on the Lacie WARNING : it seems that clunc broadcasts to U-Boot only to the interface where you have the default route, beware if you have more than one Ethernet interface :. This is also a security hole in the device: anybody with IP connectivity to the Lacie can interrupt the bootstrap process and perform low level operations on the device, taking full control of it.

Here it is the output of the help and printenv print environment variables command. The commands disk boot and bootm are used to load the boot image and to run it respectively. Strange enough: I cannot start the device with boot , it does not find the hard disk. Once disassembled you can see the JTAG 8 pin connector : a 8 pin header 2.

Pin 1 is toward the hard disk, pin 8 is toward the power switch. This is a 3. The U-Boot boot loader will write to the serial port at ,8,N,1 , so the kernel during bootstrap. Once started the system will spawn a getty on the same serial port, with the same baud rate.

On the original system, only root can login, but we don't know its password. This is the start of boot messages, here you can find the full bootstrap log. After several tries, I compiled a 2. No initrd is required to boot this is fortunate , because I don't know how to install initrd with U-Boot.

Here it is the config file. We will try to compile a Debian kernel directly on the LaCie, i. Obviously this will require a lot of time, a typical Debian kernel will require over We start installing the Debian packages kernel-package and linux-source We get a. To avoid Cannot allocate memory errors, provide plenty of swap space.

The standard Mb swap partition was not sufficient, an additional 1 Gb swap file did. Compiling an arm kernel for the LaCie on a non-arm Linux box e. The Embedian project provides several prebuilt toolchains for Debian.

Table of Contents lacie-nas. The slideshow is available here. Support for machines based on Marvell Orion SoCs. Support for machines based on Marvell Kirkwood SoCs v2 boards. Client for LaCie U-boot NetConsole which allow to interact with the bootloader without need of serial cable. NAS system tools. Update U-Boot to mainline. How install Debian on a 2Big Network. Install an ArchLinux system. Build your own kernel prepared for u-boot with device tree appended. There are tools for documentation, communication, code and releases sharing.

See how to enter in the game. This wiki is open. Everyone can read, everyone can write. This is a living space. Don't hesitate to contribute! Server: irc. LaCie wiki at nas-central.

LaCie's GPL tarballs on nas-central.