Thursday, January 29, 2009

DNS-323 hacking: Adding Telnet support

I bought myself a DLINK DNS-323 (hardware revision B1) NAS unit. I fitted it with 2 Western Digital WD10EADS 1TB "Green Caviar" hard drives.

I was a bit disappointed that the "independant disk" operation couldn't be used so I had to revert to a RAID-1 configuration.
Upgrading the firmware to 1.06 was a breeze ( don't forget to unzip the distribution file before attempting the upgrade :-)

Telnet
Hacking the device for Telnet support was a bit more problematic: the good source of information I could find was here. The package release 0.5 works like a charm.

Details
  • DNS-323 HW rev B1
  • 2x WD10EADS hard-disks
  • Firmware rev 1.06
  • Fun_Plug release 0.5

Monday, January 12, 2009

My Python library: command-line backup tools mainly

Through my daytime work, I use online tools a lot ( e.g. Gliffy, MindMeister )  so one could say I am confident about conducting work online.  Sometimes though I feel I need a safety net and this is why I like to use my moonlight time to calm my qualms about the possibility of loosing my work.


To this effect, I have created a python library with several command-line tools ( cross-platform i.e. Windows and Linux, tested on Ubuntu ) to perform, amongst other tasks, backup of my online documents.  The library documentation page is available here.