fvdw-sl-15-3 release for Raspberry Pi b

[fvdw]

A release of the fvdw-sl-15-3 nas firmware for the raspberry Pi model b is is available in the download topic of this forum
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1878
Please read the instruction posted there carefully and post your feedback in this topic.

[Haribo]

First of all. This is fucking amazing and it needs to reach the Raspberry Pi crowd, in a big way.
Even in it’s current state, or maybe after a first revision ;)

Disclaimer: First time testing fvdw.

My setup:
Raspberry Pi model B (512MB)
Sandisk 8GB SDHC, Class 10
Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2TB HDD (portable, small, low power).
Kingston Datatraveler 100 32GB USB stick.
Belkin USB2 hub powered (not in use right now as the HDD apparently can be powered by the Pi. I have tried the hub and it seems to cause some extra issues right now)


Quick testing:
Image doesn’t fit on 4GB SD card (tried 3 different ones). 8GB worked fine.

The automounting doesn’t always work. It seem to depend a bit on the filesystem. Eventually I got it to recognise the USB stick and automount it, without resorting to SSH.

The HDD is of course quite large and the system seem to have some issues with the amount of cylinders/blocks or whatever. Apart from this though, the disk was not automounted by the system at all. It was recognised as in I could check the SMART values but nothing more.

After a SSH-session and formating the drive to ext4, not mounting it, it was automounted after a reboot. The free space does however fluctuate a bit. Sometimes I have 1,8TB. Sometimes roughly 700GB. And sometimes 0GB “free”. As of writing I haven’t troubleshooted this fully yet.

Another thing. The system never lists the disks under “USB disks”, even those that have been correctly automounted. I’m guessing this is where you’re supposed to be able to format it/mount it and such.


Suggestions:
Not that important: Autoresize the internal share to whatever the SD card can hold. Keep a warning though as to using it as a share. But people might want to use i, so let them.

The firmware is on Arch Linux right? Lightweight as that might be, are there any hardware compatibility pros to using Raspbian maybe? Support for more hardware? Bigger disks? I dunno. Just saying. Raspbian isn’t that big? I already need to use a 8GB card ;) You can set the memory allocation in raspbian for headless use.


That is all for now. Will play with this some more soon. Trying out shares and media server.

[Haribo]

WGET works.
Basic sharing works.
DLNA/Streaming works.

I have also gotten the big HDD to keep being mounted properly.
So basically it's the first setup and connection/mounting of disks that seems to have some problems.
Automount and the listing in "USB disks" under Disk Setup probably need some work.
Also on my HDD the spindown doesn't work.

The system seems very fast on my end.

[Elnef]

I have installed in my Pi today and it´s working perfectly.

It´s really awesome. One complete NAS in my Pi.

My Raspi is a Rev B with 256 MB, and web interfaces works fast. I could install in a MicroSD Kingston 4GB Class 4.

I have tested:
- Sharing by SAMBA my usb disk (500 GB EXT4). OK
- Sharing by FTP my usb disk (500 GB EXT4). OK
- Manage users with Total Access one and Read Only one.
- Cron. OK

I have a question. Is it possible to download from premium servers like Uploaded or Mega? I only see torrent options. I use PyLoad for this use in my Pi.

What port I have to open to access web interfaces from internet?

[Haribo]

Update:
Spindown works on USB when enabled for internal HDD.
Transmission works. But I can't change the download directory. It's greyed out in Transmissions settings?

@Elnef Port 80 if it is the standard web interface.

[fvdw]

thanks for your feedback :thumbup much appreciated. I will reply to some issues mentions above this evening

@elnef
I don't know Pyload myself but it seems to be a Python application (correct).
Pyhton can be installed as addon to the firmware, see download section on plugout (sub forum addons).
Pyload isn't integrated in the webinterface (yet)

About access from Internet. This depends form your LAN setup.
I assume the raspberry is behind a router. In that case you need to use port forwarding in your router to forward ports on internet side of your router to the raspberry. In principle you can forward any port you like but be aware of opening security holes.

The webinterface of the fvdw-sl firmware can run in normal http mode port and secure mode https. It uses the standard ports for that.
Use the firmware system setup menus to change from http to https

For the other server you can see in the web interface which ports are used. Anyone of those could be forwarded to the internet if you like, but those don't use encrypted communication

[Jocko]

Hi Haribo,

Indeed, the firmware uses a patched version and this feature is not available.

Update:
Spindown works on USB when enabled for internal HDD.
Transmission works. But I can't change the download directory. It's greyed out in Transmissions settings?

@Elnef Port 80 if it is the standard web interface.

[fvdw]

finally found some time to give comments, sorry to keep you waiting Haribo

Quick testing:
Image doesn’t fit on 4GB SD card (tried 3 different ones). 8GB worked fine.

oops i used a standard 4GB usb stick to prepare the image, need to make it a little smaller apparently to fit on standard 4GB SD card

The automounting doesn’t always work. It seem to depend a bit on the filesystem. Eventually I got it to recognise the USB stick and automount it, without resorting to SSH.

The sd card reading and writing seems to have delay sometimes and causes this kind problems I noticed that as well

The HDD is of course quite large and the system seem to have some issues with the amount of cylinders/blocks or whatever. Apart from this though, the disk was not automounted by the system at all. It was recognised as in I could check the SMART values but nothing more.

Was this disk formatted ?

After a SSH-session and formating the drive to ext4, not mounting it, it was automounted after a reboot. The free space does however fluctuate a bit. Sometimes I have 1,8TB. Sometimes roughly 700GB. And sometimes 0GB “free”. As of writing I haven’t troubleshooted this fully yet.

this seems to be related to the mount issues,

Another thing. The system never lists the disks under “USB disks”, even those that have been correctly automounted. I’m guessing this is where you’re supposed to be able to format it/mount it and such.

In the fvdw-ls raspberry setup the usb disk are classified as "internal" disks because the raspberry itself doesn't have a sata interface. We need to use the usb disk to read/write data because tSD card won't survice long if we use that as main disk and of course storing capacity is small.
In the normal fvdw-sl firmware the usb disk are mounted as one big share. This setup for the raspberry allows to create shared folders on the usb disk(s)

Suggestions:
Not that important: Autoresize the internal share to whatever the SD card can hold. Keep a warning though as to using it as a share. But people might want to use i, so let them.

yes this could be done and is on the to do list.

The firmware is on Arch Linux right? Lightweight as that might be, are there any hardware compatibility pros to using Raspbian maybe? Support for more hardware? Bigger disks? I dunno. Just saying. Raspbian isn’t that big? I already need to use a 8GB card ;) You can set the memory allocation in raspbian for headless use.

We currently only use the arch linux kernel and not the arch linux filesystem. If you use the root filesystem of arch linux you get dependency problems with several binaries as present in the firmware. The problem is not hardware but software.
The binaries in the firmware are compiled against a specific root filesystem and specific versions of libraries including the right option. I tried to run it using the arch linux root file system but it gives segmentation faults due to dependency issues.
To make it compatible with arh linux root file system, or raspbian, all of them will need to be recompiled against that root file system and missing libs need to be added..a big job.
As long as the root file system of the firmware has to be used I think there is no advantage to use a raspbian kernel.

Remark: all binaries in the firmware are compiled for arm5v. The raspberry has an arm6 processor. From what i read it should be compatible and until now it seems to work ok but maybe I overlook something.
The firmware is using glibc 2.17 and latest version of php, apache etc. so pretty well up to date


The main issue seems to be for the moment the not 100% reliability of the mounting process

[Haribo]

The main issue seems to be for the moment the not 100% reliability of the mounting process

Agreed. Some of my problems could be me or the disk in question. But yes, the mounting is probably not 100% right now.

Further testing has also confirmed that the rsync-server works well, for me at least :)
And multiple users, shares etc.

[Elnef]

Is there any log for user connections?

I know it for FTP, but I want one for WebDav.