I wanted to start a thread specific to this device so I can post my findings and hopefully encourage others to do the same:
Partitions
For some reason this devices insists on creating both a Fat32 and NTFS partition. I'm not sure why.
Login
telnet to the box and log in as root with no password
Settings things at Startup
It seems that this device has a read-only root filesystem. I was not successful in Trying to mount it as read/write however I did find a few things:
The files in /usr/local/etc will persist across reboots.
/usr/local/etc/rcS is a startup script that can be edited. I changed mine to have this as the last line:
/usr/local/etc/startup &
This will run a new script in the background so it cannot stop the rcS script from finishing. This is a safety measure in case I add something the prevents the unit from finishing a boot or restarting.
My /usr/local/etc/startup script currently looks like this:
#sleep two minutes so I have time to log in and edit or delete this file if it causes problems on boot.
sleep 120
mkdir /tmp/hdd/volumes/smb
mkdir /tmp/hdd/volumes/smb/public
mkdir /tmp/hdd/volumes/smb/pubreadwrite
#run mount in background in case it hangs
mount //192.168.x.x/public /tmp/hdd/volumes/smb/public -t cifs -o username=Realtek_guest &
#seems to not like two mount commands running at the same time.
sleep 5
mount //192.168.x.x/pubreadwrite /tmp/hdd/volumes/smb/pubreadwrite -t cifs -o username=Realtek_guest &
This makes it so my SMB shares are always mounted and accessible on the same path has my drive.
Web Server
The web server HTML and CGI scripts posted here seem to work but they disappear on a reboot. I might keep the files elsewhere and soft link /tmp/www on startup or maybe copy the files on startup. (I might also take a crack at translating them to English :-) )
That's all I have found for now since I've only had the device for 1 day. I have not tried the chroot environment yet but it looks interesting.
It seems that the NTFS partition is read only. What if I unmount the NTFS partion, make a fat32 partion on it and remount?
It looks like the mkdosfs command can do this.
Has anyone tried this?
Disregard. The device allows you to dedicate 100% of disk to fat32. Of course you are then limited to <4GB files but I can deal with that.
Here's a neat trick: you can send commands to the device using telnet on another linux machine line this:
- This will output the time on the media player
(echo root; sleep 2 ; echo date ; sleep 2)| telnet 192.168.x.x
This thing uses a weird MAC address. 00:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
I'm thinking that this must be set in software and is probably the same address on every unit. That means you gotta separate these things via a IP gateway if you expect to use more than one at home. Two of them probably won't work on the same broadcast domain.
I have tried to change the MAC address using the "ifconfig hw ether" command but it doesn't seem to work.