Linux/BSD on the N5200

[thomasw]

Hi guys,

anyone already tried to run linux or bsd on his n5200?
The last few days i was a bit bored and the weather sucked too so i decided to give it a shot.

I think there are 2 ways to install your own os on it.
One of them is to get a bigger horizontal ide flash card and the other
is using a standard 2.5" ide notebook hd (the way i decided to do it).

I openend op my case and checked for a place were i could probably
mount the disc. I found those 4 mounting holes at the top:
users.blacksec.org/~th/n5200/2.jpg
They do perfectly fit a 2.5" drive. So there is only 2 things hardware-wise you need to get: 2.5" ide harddrive and a 44pin 2.5" cable with about 20cm length.

After that i mounted the 2.5" hd into a USB case and hooked it up to my desktop and performed a quick install of OpenBSD 4.1 from there then put the drive back in the n5200, connected the 5200 to desktop using a serial cable and watched OpenBSD boot up over terminal.

Thats it so far, iam going to get linux working now and play a bit
with the raid setup / encrypted raid (dm-crypt/luks) and other things.

Other information:
users.blacksec.org/~th/n5200/1.jpg
users.blacksec.org/~th/n5200/3.jpg
users.blacksec.org/~th/n5200/dmesg.txt

[juice]

Any progress?

I would be interested to see if FreeNAS (www.freenas.org/) can be installed. It contains the majority of features I need.

[thomasw]

my progress so far:

i have debian 4.0 running stable for a few days now.
at the moment i have a testing raid set up with 3 320gb drives
which are fully encrypted using cryptsetup-luks with aes256
with this setup iam getting about 9mb/sec read/write speed on the
cryptodiscs (maybe this will speed up a bit when i replace the standard
ram with 512mb?)

about freenas, ill try to test it in the next days .. will post the results here. 80gb 2.5" drive like iam using now seems a bit overkill for freenas, ill try to get a ide flash card and put it on there.

[kniteowl]

I looked at freenas, but couldn't justify putting something on that does not offer any more than what the stock firmware offers now. A full Linux/BSD distribution would be a different thing.

On a side note, if you wanted to use freenas, why not just use the DOM on the system as is. As a firmware replacement, it would be a perfect choice, as the DOM is 64 megs and the freenas currently only requires 32, so it would be a perfect setup without making any changes.

Teng

[apache]

Hi Thomasw,

Do you mind explaining a little more about how you did the installation of Linux?

If you installed Linux with the disk attached to your desktop, didn't you have any trouble to boot it up when you put the disk back to your N5200?

N5200 doesn't have a video card, so what did you set in your instalation to use just the seral port?

[ ]'s

[omega]

Hi Thomas,

do you mind to give us some more detailed information here?

Would be great....

Andreas

[tairus]

VGA/PS2 ports can be soldered and will be fully functional. Everything in N5200 is like in normal PC including IDE port to where standard Hard Drive can be attached.

I don't see any problem to install linux or even windows.

The question is: Will current RAID be functional on normal linux or not...

[omega]

About your question: it depends on what Linux version you'll install, but most likely it will work due to the internal representation of the RAID and LVM structure haven't changed for some time (afaik).

Andreas

[cheburashka]

My RAID 5 continued to operate fine when I switched from thecus firmware to a standard gentoo linux distro. (Actually, it operates somewhat better.)

The thecus firmware creates a second raid (/dev/md1) ~100 MB large out of the first partition on each disk automatically. I cannot figure out what this RAID is used for, if in fact it is used for anything, and it does not come up in regular linux.