Lacie 19" Ethernet Disks are a cheap NAS alternative. They are shipped with Windows® XP Embedded (don´t know really why), and they support SMB, AFP, FTP, HTTP, Bonjour, and LaCie Network Assistant for Mac and PC. Inside, you can find a VIA C7 1GHz with 256/512MB of RAM, 4 SATA disks and a Gigabit Ethernet... so, why not try to install Fedora and get a much more versatile server?
1 - See what is there inside
In the back side you will find 3 screws. Note that breaking the left side seal means loosing any warranty... so it's up to you.
Once open, you will see a small motherboard with a single memory bank, and 2 SATA connectors, and 2 more conectors are found in a PCI SATA controller. Both 4TB and 6TB models contain 4 SATA disk.
Installed memory was:
- 6TB Ethernet Disk: V-DATA - Memory - 512 MB - DIMM 240-pin - DDR2 - 533 MHz / PC2-4300 - CL4 - 1.8 V - unbuffered - non-ECC (Product Code: VD2533512MOU)
- 4TB Ethernet Disk: same, but 256MB
So, I decided to upgrade the memory to 1GB - DDR2 - 533 MHz
2 - Download Fedora Core 12
You can get it from http://fedoraproject.org. I downloaded the i386 DVD image.
3 - Boot from external USB DVD
External DVD unit was recogniced and autonatically used to boot.
4 - Intall Fedora Core 12
First step was the partitioning. I selected "Use entire drive", and left automatic (default) partitioning.
It took about 3 hours to create the file system.
Once finished, I selected the minimum required software and configured nfs server. You can get Fedora 12 installation information at: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f12/en-US/html. Note that in order to run a simple nfs server, you can disable unused services and set runlevel to 3 in /etc/inittab.
5 - Change BIOS to boot from /dev/sda
Seems that the disk detected as "/dev/sda" was not the default boot disk (Channel2 Master), so I had to change it in the BIOS, and set SCSI-0 as fisrt.
That's all... Good luck!
