I took the time tonight and compared version 1.00.05 against version 1.00.06.5 and here are the main differences:
1) /img/bin/...
1.1) The btn_reset script has been changed slightly to recover more settings from the saved config DB
1.2) The logevent/email script has been changed almost the way I was proposing, but still they screwed up the envelope From: syntax (it is stil invalid and will not be accepted by my MTA). The from address changed from "$host_name@$ip_addr" to "admin@$hostname.nicdomain" where nicdomain is a config DB variable which can be set using the web configuration interface.
1.3) The /img/bin/raid_start script has been changed so the Raid Update Time (utime) is not used anymore. Have had no chance yet to find out what reasons/consequences this might has.
1.4) The smb daemon is not started with the "--use-spin-locks" argument any more.
1.5) The usb.hotplug script has been fixed so mounting any Linux supported filesystems on an external attached USB device should now work (they now just omit any special mount options, so the FAT and NTFS specific options weren't needed anyway). Ya know, they're reading this forum......
2) /img/www/...
There are many changes and it takes tto much time for now to investigate these in detail. So I've had just a quick look and tried to guess what's going on sometimes.....
2.1) There seems to be a generic module support: you can read in modules (again encrypted compressed tar files) but the description must in XML format, uninstall is supported too. I don't know much about the Thecus N2100 but I think I've seen this module support there so I assume that same will be availabe on the N5200 too. Unfortunately they choosed /raid/data/module as the base directory so I need to changes this for all my modules (but maybe I need to convert them to the new format anyway).
2.2) The new firmware seems to support NETWARE - the netware daemon is started and there are new configuration pages for netware.
2.3) The new firmware seems to support SNMP - the snmp daemon is started on bootup (if it was enabled in the configuration) and the configuration HTML pages are there.
2.4) The setwinad.html script (for WinNT domain settings) has been reworked signigficantly, the diff output shows too many differences.
3) /lib/modules/...
They seemed to have recompiled all modules because all modules show diffrences when comparing the two version (the timestamps have changed?).
4) /opt/...
There are two new packages here: mars_nwe (for netware) and netsnmp (for SNMP). All other packages are exactly the same, so no differences here.
5) Misc.
5.1) The kernel version is still the same. The kernel itself changed and I cannot tell you anything about what changed.
5.2) The ramdisk size for booting was changed from 40960 to 56320 KB.
Summary:
In my opinion Thecus is trying hard to improve the N5200 software: new features like SNMP and NETWARE (even though I don't think that netware is that important anymore...) will be available and the new module features seems to be promising (at least to me).
They tried to fix some of the bugs we were describing here and on the Thecus Wiki but at least the E-Mail notification scripts is still buggy (I'll try that this gets fixed for the final release).
Please take into account that this is a unofficial BETA release, so I would perhaps wait installing that firmware until Thecus is giving any recommendments about it.
If you install that firmware, all my modules will
NOT WORK without modifications.....
Hope this informations helps you somehow........
Good night
Andreas
It's not supposed to be this difficult.
