LaCie Ethernet Big Disk

Submitted by lalee-admin2 on Mon, 08/06/2007 - 10:13

Updated 2008-July-08
Sorry, the LaCie Big Ethernet Disk is now "dead" to me. my unit finally failed on me, with nasty disk drive errors that I can't recover.

That, combined with the dismal throughput of the device over Ethernet has completely soured my enthusiasm for LaCie products in general, and I will be wary before buying another of their products any time soon. It was pathetic - even with a Gigabit connection, the device had a slow CPU that just couldn't pump out data fast enough.

In fact, my trusty old Xbox-Linux machine outperformed this device -- which is why I'm now looking to get the biggest PATA drive I can find, and convert an old Xbox into my next "Cheap NAS" device.

I may decide to sell the remnants of this unit (without the dead/dying drives) for $125 to recoup some of the costs, if anyone needs spare parts for this. Otherwise, this thing will just collect dust in a junk bin in my Lab. Phooey.

Alrighty -- I couldn't help but pick up one of these machines -- it's a Gigabit-Ethernet capable Terabyte NAS for $275!! *AND* it includes a USB Port, which opens up a lot of other hacking potential. I fired the little box up, and went through the Web User Interface pages. Glancing over the Status Logs, it was apparent that this machine runs BusyBox on a Linux Kernel.

Ohh yeah, this is definitely a box that can be torn into -- once we figure out how to get a console session into the system. It also appears that LaCie is complying with the GPL requirements by making a source code archive available for our convenience. Nice.

Next Steps

The first thing I'd like to do is identify the jumpers or test-points for the serial port, since there's already support for a console on ttyS0, which is a 16550-based UART. Failing that, I'd try a USB Serial port -- with the USB-end going into the router, and Serial-end going into my PC. That orientation is actually backwards from most other setups, and I'm not sure it'll work. It might work just because there's a USB port readily available, and the built-in Linux Kernel might have been bundled with a USB-Serial driver.

Another option to try is to simply download the source code from LaCie's website. If everything checks out and I'm able to rebuild (and run) a working firmware from that source code distribution, then getting a console could be as easy as enabling a DropBear SSH Daemon in the source code, rebuilding the firmware, and convincing the router to execute this update firmware (either remote-boot via TFTP, or by flashing the onboard chip).