Bend in the Weather

I've owned a Maxtor Shared Storage Plus NAS (MSS+) device for quite a while. It was reasonably cheap when we picked it up and it's well and truly paid for itself saving me on several occasions!

It's basically a 500GB disk inside an enclosure that you network (10/100Mbps), and contains 2 additional USB ports so you either plug additional USB storage or a USB printer into (to make it a networked printer).

In our instance we use it mainly for backing up. For this purpose it serves well.

We ran into a problem today when the device filled.
That was unusual, as we traditionally have loads of space left on it (we only backup our content/configurations), not the OS or applications... and we purge old backups.

A closer inspection showed that the backup software we were running on the Windows machine was actually not removing old archive files. That explained the lack of disk space.

It seemed under certain conditions that the Windows machine was unable to delete the files it created. This now appears more an issue with Windows then the actual backup software. (I could delete the mentioned files using Nautilus fine under Linux, just not through Explorer!)

Whilst the device itself has worked flawlessly (it basically creates SMB based shares), it did become a problem when large amounts of files needed to be deleted (it was dreadfully slow over SMB - as it appeared to require a full stat of the files to be deleted, prior to even commencing the delete ). This could take hours before one file was ever deleted.

It always was frustrating that besides the web-interface to manage the device, that SMB appeared to be the only option available for file management.

Many people have used SLUGs (aka NSLU2 - LinkSys's NAS device). This allowed people to use modified firmware to create a nice embedded Linux device, allowing them to install additional software and expand on the base functionality.

How nice would this be with my MSS+

I thought I would take a peep at the support website, as I realized that this device too is likely to use OSS software such as Samba to create it. Low and behold, the source code was available.

This got my creative juices running! Could I use this to create a modded version myself and add items like NFS, FTP and SSH to the device? Surely someone else has already thought the same thing.

Apparently they have! OpenMSS is just that. Not only does it put down a telnet server by default (so you can login, they have got BusyBox working on it as well.

From my reading it appears NFS is there, just was never enabled on the original firmware image. It also allows you to install additional software, as well as a bunch of software from the ports made available through the work by the guys over as nslu2-linux.org.

It looks like with little work I'll be able to have an FTP, NFS and rsync all as options, as well as SSH to login to the box.
The list of packages available is breath-taking, and I can see a lot of work has gone into the porting.

What's even better, the web-interface and existing data stay intact when migrating over to OpenMSS -- just the ability to get into the heart of the box is opened up.

So I think it's now a case of having a play around and actually getting some 'smarts' into this device. I'm doing away with the Windows backup software and we'll look at running a central backup from the device itself to pull in backups from other hosts using rsync. (much nicer). I see ccollect is one of the packages available, so this may indeed do the trick... just through on vixie cron at the same time and I've got a nice simple and effective solution.

I felt a little cheated initially when I heard of the SLUG (after my MSS+ purchase) now I'm feeling quite happy that I can play in the same league!

It's a job for later in the week/weekend (when time permits), but it appears I may have just solved some of the issues that has been burning me for ages (access to the device and trouble free backups from Windows to it). I'll keep you posted on the outcome.

Don't ya just love OSS -- putting the power back in the users hands!