Recovering a TeraStation

Recently, I had one of these land in my lap. Not literally, thankfully, as they weigh a ton and have pointy edges; regardless, I have one in my possession.

This particular box is an ARM-powered TeraStation Pro v2, and, as is the way with these things, it was broken. Retired from it’s backup duties, it had sat underneath a desk for some time with what I assumed would be a straightforward problem to fix. On applying some power it became obvious from the incessant beeping that drive 3 was kaput. So I had a little fight with it, swapping drives and breaking the cheap and superfluous little plastic clips on the carriers.

Eventually, I managed to make it appear happy by removing both drives 3 and 4 – then it got stuck booting and I pulled the plug. Powering back up I was treated to this happy little message on the screen:

TFTP MODE E06: Lost boot image

Well, at least that’s different problem to not knowing the admin password, I suppose.

Recovery with TFTP

When you see the E06 error, the TeraStation will sit with the IP address 192.168.11.150 and repeatedly try to fetch files from a TFTP server at 192.168.11.1. Thankfully, the way in which it does this is pretty sensible; so long as you have a TFTP server running on that IP address, and it’s hosting the files from a firmware update, it should fetch those files and spring back to life almost immediately. I used TFTP Server for Mac OS X, but there are numerous ones available for other platforms. The free TFTP from SolarWinds works well on Windows.

For the TS-H1.0TGL/R5 that I was working with, these are the firmware update files – just be sure to use v1.33 and not v1.35, otherwise you won’t be able to do the fun bit in a moment.

Also, remember that once the box has booted you will need to run the firmware update program from Windows. All you have done so far is boot the box over TFTP; it hasn’t saved that firmware anywhere, so if you power off, it’ll be TFTP mode all over again. I found it best to edit the lsupdater.ini file in the firmware update directory to contain this:

[Flags]
VersionCheck = 0

[SpecialFlags]
Debug=1

That enables a debug mode (accessed by right-clicking the title bar) which allows you to force a firmware update and format the drives at the same time. By this point I had found a replacement for Drive 3, so with all four drives alive, that’s what I chose to do. It takes it’s sweet time, but eventually (and after a few reboots) the TeraStation was alive!

I took a bit of time to set it up properly now, creating a RAID10 array and a share so people could use it. Very good.

Oh, look! Linux!

Did I promise a fun bit? Well, it comes in the form of acp_commander.jar.

There’s a very good NAS resource in the form of NAS-Central, without which this box would still be a footrest. The good people over there have developed acp_commander. This little Java program will open up Telnet access to your box, give you a blank root password and even install a few added extras to make your command line a little more useful. Back on my Mac it was a simple case of:

java -jar acp_commander.jar -t 192.168.11.150 -o -gui 1

Which puts the web interface back into English, as well as opening up the box. You can then:

telnet 192.168.11.150

Command prompt!

Because I did have some troubles with the automated add-ons installation, I just downloaded the addons.tar from here, copied it to the share I created earlier and decompressed it from there:

tar -C / -xvf /mnt/array1/<share name>/addons.tar

For everything to work properly, you’ll also need the libproc-3.2.6_arm9.tgz library file from here

cd /mnt/array1/<share name>
wget http://downloads.nas-central.org/Users/kaiten/libproc-3.2.6_arm9.tgz
tar -C / -zxvf libproc-3.2.6_arm9.tgz
ldconfig -v

You can then apply a couple of quick fixes, which sort out some potential permission problems:

chmod 666 /dev/null
chmod 644 /etc/profile
touch /var/log/lastlog
chmod 744 /var/log/lastlog

Probably sensible to set a root password with passwd root while you’re there.

So now you’re all done. Except, you don’t really want Telnet, do you?

Enabling and Maintaining SSH

First, create /etc/init.d/sshd.sh containing:

#!/bin/sh

#
# Start/stop the SSH daemon.
#

test -f /usr/local/sbin/sshd || exit 0

# this is used by daemonwatch (since fw 1.11-1a)
ACTIVE_FILE=/var/run/active_sshd

case "$1" in
start)
	echo "Start service: sshd"
	/usr/local/sbin/sshd -f /etc/sshd_config
	touch ${ACTIVE_FILE}
	;;
stop)
	echo "Stop service: sshd"
	killall sshd
	rm -f ${ACTIVE_FILE}
	;;
restart)
	$0 stop
	$0 start
	;;
*)
	echo "Usage: $0 start|stop|restart"
	exit 1
	;;
esac
exit 0

Then set execute permissions:

chmod 755 /etc/init.d/sshd.sh

Now make sure the configuration is correct. Your /etc/sshd_config should contain:

port 22
Protocol 2,1
PermitRootLogin yes
StrictModes yes
Subsystem       sftp    /usr/local/libexec/sftp-server

Then you need to add it to the startup routine. In /etc/init.d/rcS you’ll find a for loop called ‘Step 3’: immediately before the entry for ‘daemonwatch.sh’, add ‘sshd.sh’. It should look like this when you’re done:

echo "** step3 **"
for cmd in micon_setup.sh ... clientUtil_servd.sh lsprcvd.sh sshd.sh daemonwatch.sh cron.sh ltbootd.sh logchkd.sh
do
        exec_sh $cmd
done

Finally, get the system’s dameonwatch to keep it alive by adding this line to /etc/daemonwatch.list:

/var/run/sshd.pid       /var/run/active_sshd       /etc/init.d/sshd.sh restart

Then give the TeraStation a reboot.

Happy TeraStation

So now you have root access to your TeraStation and you can do anything you like with it, which is great. You’ve only got 128MB RAM and a 400MHz ARM CPU to play with, so I wouldn’t try running Folding@Home on it, but there are options.

For instance, you could install the ipkg package manager to add more things to your system. It’s as simple as this:

mkdir /mnt/array1/tmp
cd /mnt/array1/tmp
wget http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs05q3armel/cross/stable/teraprov2-bootstrap_1.2-7_arm.xsh
sh teraprov2-bootstrap_1.2-7_arm.xsh

Then you get all the usual ipkg update and ipkg install commands.

Or, if you’re a little jealous of the TeraStation Live with it’s media server, you could well and truly trump it by installing Logitech Media Server.

But that’s for another article.

The content of this article is an amalgamation of my notes from when I was performing the recovery. The people who did the hard work wrote it up themselves, so for more detail, you could visit: Info & Facts, Firmware Swapping, Opening Stock Firmware, ipkg installation. That video’s not mine either. :)

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January 14, 2012

Technology