Buffalo NAS-Central Forums

This is a step-by-step on how to install Lenny on a TeraStation Pro II (will refer to this by TS in this guide)

Warning! – This is NOT a simple task! – read the entire guide and understand what you need to do before you continue. There is no easy way of installing Lenny on the TS for now! (I struggled myself and had to redo the partitioning tables on another machine – you might need to do the same!)
I will not guarantee it will work for you – do it at your own risk…

There are a couple of guides available that describe how to install Lenny on a LinkStation device (single drive devices):
- http://buffalo.nas-central.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=5241
- http://buffalo.nas-central.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=72241#p72241
All credit to the authors of these posting and thanks for all their effort in providing those guides. I have used a combination of these in order to get my TS working. There are however significant differences between the devices used in these guides and the TS!

Backup your data before you continue. While the backup run read the entire guide as you need to copy some files to your TS before you start or you will end up with a lot of wasted time!

I assume your TS are running and you have serial access – if not go fix that before you continue!

First we need to fetch some files and store them on the drive on the boot partition. The ramdisk needs to be converted to u-boot format with mkimage

First, let’s sure we can access the boot partition – we mount it as “b”


The ramdisk is the Versatile installer of the Lenny distribution but we need to convert it into an image readable mby u-root. You can download the sources of mkimage here http://buffalo.nas-central.org/download/Users/lb_worm/mkimage/ , or grab the compiled version here:

Do EITHER

OR


We will need micro_evtd as well to replace to Buffalo micon stuff. Read all about here: http://buffalo.nas-central.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4490 You can get the source from here and compile for the TS: http://buffalo.nas-central.org/download/Users/lb_worm/micro_evtd/

There are some packages avail elsewhere but again only for a LS device. Download the one I have compiled for the TS device here:

wget http://buffalo.nas-central.org/download ... TSP.tar.gz

We will need a kernel as well. This kernel is a plain 2.6.16.16 like the stock Buffalo one. Only change is that I have added support for USB Print – and oh yes, I have recompiled it of cause.



Copy initrd.buffalo and your kernel named uImage.buffalo into a tftp server – for windows I only managed to get tftp32 working (properly my fault!) – YOU WILL NEED TO CHANGE YOUR TFTP SERVER’S IP TO 192.168.11.1

You have remembered to backup all your data?

Now let’s ensure you have the following filed in the /boot partition – your /b directory for now:

initrd.buffalo
kernel-2.6.16.16_TSP-usblp.tar.gz
micro_evtd_TSP.tar.gz
mkimage
uImage.buffalo

then copy the kernel – I really wan’t to skip all Buffalo

Now we should be ready to install Lenny of the TS.

Connect the serial console and boot – follow carefully on the console – on the FIRST countdown press enter and you are now in the u-boot menu. I can only suggest you learn how to use this but that’s beyond this guide.



u-boot will now acquire the two files from your tftp server and starts the installer. Install lenny as you wish.

You will need to repartition your disk: delete all raid sets and partitions and then setup new partitions as you like.
I chose to have: boot partition (md0 – raid 1) of 512 MB, swap of 128 MB, root (md1 – raid 1) of 15 Gig and the rest for a raid5 set (md2)
Complete the installation.

Now we want to boot into the just installed lenny and not the installer so we change the bootcmd again:



WARNING – the installer left my md2 set dirty thus a full fsck was needed. This is a huge problem as the micon controller will shut down the box before this completes. How to solve? – simple, just press ctrl-c when the fsck begins.

Let the boot finish and then we need to hurry up – within 5 minutes the micon controller will shut down the TS if not told otherwise.


Verify its running (ps –ef), and check /tmp/micro_evtd/my_status

Assuming everything works we can now check md2 as follows


Now install the kernel modules.


Now reboot again, and check it’s working as expected.
Log in again, then change /etc/apt/sources.list – change sid to testing


If you wish install webmin as well.
At this point I configured samba so I could restore my backups. As for Samba performance, add this line to the global section of your /etc/samba/smb.conf:

I have also attached a Canon Pixma MP500 Printer to the USB Port. This is setup via CUPS and Gutenprint. It was a straightforward process after I found the “Allowed from” option in locations in the cupsd.conf file.
When I plugged in the printer it showed under CUPS as “Gutenprint USB#1 (Canon MP500)” –easy!

Well now you ought to have a running lenny on your TS Pro without any Buffalo leftovers.

Enjoy

Reserved for updates/comments to the guide

nice guide.

as you are recreating all partitions and especially the filesystems from scratch i guess you could have used a vanilla kernel as well.

the main difference between the stock kernel and the vanilla kernel is the incompatibility of the XFS partitions.

so who wants to verify this guide ?

I'll try this guide on a LS-WTGL, it seems to be the same approach.

I'm just waiting a Serial cable and i'll start my tests.

Thanks for this info. I was able to use this to get a Terastation Live running lenny, though with a couple of changes. I'm not terribly keen on filling my TS with molten lead, so I don't have a serial console installed. Instead I used the stock initrd in EM mode to install. I thought I'd post a few notes on the process for anyone insane enough to try the same.

First I unpacked the initrd on another system (no cpio in the stock OS), repacked it as a tarball and copied that over to the boot partition. This can also be done on the terastation with the optware cpio, but either way it has to be done as root for the device nodes to be extracted.



I copied deb_init.tar to /boot on the TS, replaced the PRODUCTID in /etc/linkstation_release with junk to force EM on the next boot, and rebooted.

After rebooting and opening up telnet with acp_commander, I reassembled the boot raid partition, created a new tmpfs mount (not enough space in the ramdisk for debian) and unpacked the debian files there. There is also a little cleanup that needs to be done in the ramdisk before starting the debian installer. I think it's safe to leave all the monitoring processes running, but I went ahead and killed them to avoid any problems. dhcpcd should definitely be killed to avoid confusing the installer, but, since this releases the lease, a new network address needs to be set in the same command.

Replacing ip_addr and netmask with whatever is being used:


And to switch to the installer initrd:


Once in the new root, the debian installer can't just be run as it would from init since it seems to expect a real console. Instead I ran about the first half of the startup scripts to get udev running and proc mounted and then ran the installer.



And before it reboots either start up a new telnet session or have the installer start a shell, install ssh, the kernel, initrd and micro_evtd. For the initrd on the new system I'm just using the stock buffalo initrd modified (using the process at http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/How_to_modify_an_initrd) to comment out most of HddRoot() in /linuxrc. AssembleSysMd is needed, but the only other two lines I kept are echoing the /dev/md1 device number into /proc/sys/kernel/real-root-dev and setting IS_HDDROOT to 1. I also removed the prompt near the bottom for whether to boot into ramdisk or hdd, since this isn't very useful without a serial console. At this point the initrd will do enough to boot on /dev/md1 but not do any of the annoying things like check the firmware version or copy files into /etc/init.d.

I've noticed a couple of oddities with micro_evtd on the TS, mostly related to the microapl shell script (the fan rpm multiplier seems to be different, and I can't seem to change the LCD/LED brightness), but other than that it's working great. It hasn't crashed, so the watchdog is obviously working.

I wouldn't really recommend this to anyone, since it's easy to mess up and pretty difficult to get the system running again. Before I started any of this I just took the disks out and copied the data from all of the first and second partitions with dd (takes about 3GB), along with the output of fdisk -l, so I was at least able to restore to the beginning from this.

Have you had any luck running newer kernels on a TS? Now that I have a recompiled kernel and a libc able to handle access control lists, I decided to expand my wishlist to include lvm, which it turns out doesn't work. I don't know if it's a driver/kernel mismatch, but device mapper is acting all kinds of wonky. I can create a physical volume but then I can't add it to a volume group.

But thanks for the help. My Terastation is certainly in more useful state than it was before.

dshea: What is the difference in the fan rpm speed? I had asked for info on this before but did not get very far. Can you say by how much it is out by so I can fix it?

lb_worm: It looks like the fan speed reported by the stock miconapl is the third byte returned times 10 instead of times 30, which I guess isn't a huge deal. I have gcc and gdb and all that on the terastation now if you want any numbers.

You are right - will http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/patch-2.6.25.10.bz2 just compile or is more work required?

Can someone please add the original u-boot environment to http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.ph ... and_Values

Thanks

Question. Is this something that would work on the TSPro1. I have two of them. I read the instructions and it looks pretty straight forward. I'm just not sure about the micro_evtd.

Also I'm sure I need to do the mkimage with the correct processor type also. Any think else I'm missing? I've been jones'n to run Debian on these hogs since I bought them 2-1/2 years ago.

Sui

Should be stright forward considering but you really donøt know until the end of it
I'd post in the micro_evtd thread to verify this. For mimage you will need one for this platform

Good luck

hello together,
i try to install debian lenny on my ts pro ll.
what i have:
ts pro ll, 4x segate 1,5tb, serial console to ts pro ll, the directory /b, mount /dev/md0 to /b.

the following files are in /b:
initrd.buffalo
kernel-2.6.16.16_TSP-usblp.tar.gz
micro_evtd_TSP.tar.gz
mkimage
uImage.buffalo

i have tftp-server running to with the following files:
initrd.buffalo
uImage.buffalo

all files are downloaded from "http://buffalo.nas-central.org/download/Users/gnyf".
after rebooting of ts pro ll i stop the booting on the first countdown and put the following in the serial console:



the ts pro ll start and the debian installer to.
i take the english language and a swiss download-server.
the first problem is :"no kernel modules were found". i continue the installation. the downloading of files begin but stop with following failure window:

failed to load installer component
loading libc6-udeb failed for unknown reasons. aborting.

what's wrong with my installation way

thx for any help

I have the same problem!!

Does anyone tell me why?