Saturday, September 27, 2008

MyBook World edition


It was a bad idea. I needed it for home storage - I was sick and tired of the tons of DVDs that I wrote with backups of the documents, DVDs that I have never been able to find afterwards without a massive deejay work. So I said "What the heck, it is cheap, it is roomy - I'll have it".
As I said - bad idea. I discovered soon that it works extremely low (a maximum of 2 MBps in my wireless lan), it gets extremely hot and in that point it hangs up (temperature was sometimes over 70 degrrees C).
I am not complaining about RAID or SNMP - I wanted something cheap - but still...
I wanted to expose some data through an ftp - for my family - but for this I had to hack the box. I followed the tutorial - so I had SSH access to the box, I installed Optware and VSFTPD. But the systems was already overloaded. So I had a look on the installed distribution. It was the ugliest ever. No package management system (Optware was installed by me), the init scripts are chaotic, the software is unbalanced (Samba 3 on 32 megabytes? and busybox).
Finally I have bricked it up with some experiments I made.
It took me about one week to recover.
The only good point in all this is that I have learnt a lot about buildroot and embedded development. I was forced to as I wanted to debrick it. So I have learnt how wonderful JeOS and RPath are. I will dream a long time to something as freeNAS for WD or why not a clean port of OpenWRT on myBook.
As for the time being I will deposit the myBook somewhere and gradualy search for a more reliable
solution.

1 comment:

  1. i'm sorry to ask this on your blog, but could you post some links that could help someone debrick the world edition?

    ReplyDelete