Promise NS4300N Network Attached Storage Firmware Modification
What is it? What are you doing?
The NS4300N is a fun little box supporting upto 4 SATA hard drives and RAID 5;
it runs Linux and has great potential for expansion.
This page documents my experiments with a Promise NS4300N NAS device,
developing a programming environment and adding new firmware to the product.
Background & History
My box has been running four 750GB disks as a 2.2TB RAID 5 array for a couple
of years now. I have also upgraded to the SR5 firmware (01.05.0000.03), and
added the FireFly (iTunes) plug-in. Because FireFly was missing transcoding
features, namely OGG & FLAC to WAV, I decided to patch together a cross-build
environment to target the PowerPC e300 (MPC8349) processor and the Linux
2.6.11 kernel running on it. This task turned out to be more difficult than
I imagined, partly because my host system is an AMD64 2.6.25 (Lenny) kernel.
Well, that and I'm incompetant. However, the
good people here have already done most of the heavy lifting.
Most of what I have done was a re-implementation of their work.
The following is a chronicle of my attempts to expand the functionality of the
server.
Conclusion
Not yet! I was thinking about porting
emacs but at 38MB for the source for version 22.3, I don't think
so. Maybe an IMAP4 server like dovecot, an updated version of
FireFly with transcoding, and a modern version of Perl.