Adventures and Geekery on an Acer EasyStore H340
So I bought this nifty little Intel Atom based NAS-like device. The only problem is that it runs Windows Home Server out of the box and contains no easy way of installing a simple Linux based distribution to get things like ZFS (or ZFS-FUSE) or Linux software RAID working. Well, you can do it by installing Ubuntu on it on another computer and then making a few tweaks and then transplanting the hard disk back into this little machine. I tried, it works, but is slightly time consuming. My experience was that after Ubuntu wouldn’t run any daemons on startup so I spent a good hour trying to understand what the heck was going on. After almost giving up, I blindly typed in my username and password and then ran the SSH daemon (e.g. /etc/init.d/sshd start). Voila! That worked so I could at least get into it and can actually fix things. So to remedy whatever bizarreness was going on, I installed rcconf and disabled and re-enabled all the required daemons and everything was now fine even after a reboot. So that was that.
Next up was the another annoying aspect and limitation of this box. It had only 4 drive bays. Since I didn’t want to waste a whole drive bay on an installation of a rather simple installation of Ubuntu, I wanted to see if I can substitute a USB stick with all the necessary packages and utilize all 4 bays for storage. Well, disaster struck here again. The machine only booted from USB if there were no HDs in the bays or a reset switch was pressed at the back. But how do you permanently change boot priority on a machine that had no video output? The answer to this is that you could build or purchase a cable that hooked on to a 26 pin connector on the motherboard. Slight annoyance here was that building a cable wasn’t exactly easy nor cheap for that matter. An enterprising individual sells pre-made cables for around $100 or so dollars since that option seemed more reasonable than purchasing a crimp tool, and all other necessary parts to build a cable, I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet, i.e. I placed a purchase order.
Another option was to purchase a PCIe X1/X4 video card since the machine had a PCIe slot, but this, again, was not a very tenable option. These cards are almost impossible to find locally and not cheap either. There was also no guarantee that the card would actually function. The option to purchase a pre-made cable looked much better at this point.
Anyhow, I knew about these limitations before I bought the box so I shouldn’t really complain all that much. All this annoyance gave me an idea of building a Linux distribution that contained everything I needed:
- Apache
- HellaNZB or SABNZBd (for News Groups)
- Transmission BitTorrent Client
- FTP Server (I don’t really need this but nice to have)
- Apple File Protocol or netatalk
Now, I am aware that FreeNAS has a lot of that functionality, but is FreeBSD based and not all that updated. So let me know if you’d be interested in willing to help test such a simple Linux based distribution that booted off of a USB stick. Let’s see how far I get with this.
My ideas thus far:
- Use Arch Linux
- Use larch to build a live/USB bootable disk
- Some sort of a basic PHP based user interface to add/remove packages and do configuration
- Email notification of disk full scenarios and/or other hardware issues
- ZFS support through ZFS-FUSE
- Software RAID0/5/etc.
Bubber
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