Debian Squeeze on 'V' and 'X' Series (LS-WXL and others)

Credits
This is based on Debian Lenny on LS-CHLv2 and Open Stock Firmware LS-XHL and was published first here by user benoqkuke.

What will you get?
You will not have to open your box (at least not unless you make a fatal mistake)! You will have a Debian Squeeze userland and the stock Buffalo kernel of your already installed firmware. So it is not a full replacement of Buffalos firmware, but mostly. ;-) To have a "complete" Debian Squeeze installation one would need to replace the kernel also. But user benoqkuke hasn't managed to build his own kernel (newer than 2.6.31) yet. So stay tuned, if you want to have a more recent kernel also.

What you need beforehand
You have to be able to use the root account on the NAS. You can follow Open Stock Firmware LS-VL or use CHL-v2/XHL 1.xx Mod 1 firmware to do that.

Debootstrap
You need to install debootstrap. To be able to do this, you need to download the package.

Log on as user root on your LinkStation. Execute this: wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.42_all.deb dpkg -i debootstrap_1.0.42_all.deb To install the new rootfs into a directory debian-squeeze execute this: mkdir debian-squeeze debootstrap --verbose --arch armel squeeze debian-squeeze http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian You may want to select a mirror nearby yourself for faster downloads.

This takes some time. When you see I: Base system installed successfully. the roots FS is almost ready.

Personalize the deboostrap
You need to have some other stuff to be able to boot off the boostrap.

Copy the initrd to the chroot environment: cp /boot/initrd.buffalo debian-squeeze/tmp

Chroot on Debian Squeeze: LANG=C chroot debian-squeeze /bin/bash

First of all update the package database to have the correct GPG-keys: apt-get update

Copy kernel modules from the linkstations initrd to the /lib/module folder: cd /tmp dd if=initrd.buffalo of=initrd.gz ibs=64 skip=1 gunzip initrd.gz  mkdir INITRD mount -t ext2 -o loop initrd INITRD cp -R INITRD/lib/modules/2.6.[3-9]?* /lib/modules/ umount INITRD rmdir INITRD rm initrd*

Configure locale: Suggestion is to install at least the en_US.UTF-8 and your native language locale (e.g. it_IT.UTF-8, de_DE.UTF-8, etc). apt-get install locales dpkg-reconfigure locales

If apt-get complains that pts isn't accessible: ignore it or mount devpts (mount -t devpts devpts /dev/pts).

If you are going to set up a raid, install mdadm: mount -t proc proc /proc apt-get install --no-install-recommends mdadm umount /proc

Editing /etc/fstab (with vi or nano): # /dev/sda2       /             xfs     defaults,noatime         0    1 /dev/sda1       /boot         ext3    ro,nosuid,nodev          0    2 /dev/sda5       none          swap    sw                       0    0 /dev/sda6       /mnt/disk1    xfs     defaults,noatime         0    0 proc            /proc         proc    defaults                 0    0 devpts          /dev/pts      devpts  gid=4,mode=620 	   0    0 tmpfs           /tmp          tmpfs   defaults                 0    0 sysfs           /sys          sysfs   defaults                 0    0
 * 1) /etc/fstab: static file system information.
 * 1) file system    mount point   type    options                  dump pass

If you are going to set up a raid, install mdadm: mount -t proc proc /proc apt-get install --no-install-recommends mdadm umount /proc

Create disk1 in mnt: mkdir /mnt/disk1

If you are going to set up a raid, create array1 in mnt instead: mkdir /mnt/array1

Edit /etc/network/interfaces to match your LAN configuration.

If you use DHCP, simply request an IP on eth0 an eth1: auto lo iface lo inet loopback auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp auto eth1 iface eth1 inet dhcp
 * 1) Used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8). See the interfaces(5) manpage or
 * 2) /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples for more information.
 * 1) We always want the loopback interface.

If you have static IP: Make sure to use the correct interface name, otherwise your Linkstation may boot up but will not get an IP address. Check etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules for this.

auto lo iface lo inet loopback auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.1.6 network 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.1.1
 * 1) Used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8). See the interfaces(5) manpage or
 * 2) /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples for more information.
 * 1) We always want the loopback interface.

Set /etc/hostname echo > /etc/hostname MYNAS

Edit /etc/hosts to resolve your hostname 127.0.0.1      localhost.localdomain localhost 127.0.0.1      MYNAS ::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback fe00::0 ip6-localnet ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix ff02::1 ip6-allnodes ff02::2 ip6-allrouters ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
 * 1) The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts

Install sshd: apt-get install --no-install-recommends openssh-server

Change root password: passwd root

Check that root login is enable in /etc/ssh/sshd_config: grep PermitRootLogin /etc/ssh/sshd_config should show a line "PermitRootLogin yes".

Clean up the package database (this reduces the size quite a lot) aptitude clean

Prepare rootfs: exit cd debian-squeeze tar --numeric-owner -p -czf ../hddrootfs.buffalo.updated * cd ..

Prepare an initrd image
If you are going to set up a raid, you need to build an Initrd for Raid-Boot.

If you are not going to use an Raid: Download empty initrd from. If you do not trust an external source like this you may either a) follow the instructions in Initrd for Raid-Boot (but leave teh content away) or b) check the content of this one as shown above. wget http://tyche.pu-toyama.ac.jp/~a-urasim/lsxhl/data/initrd.buffalo Yes, an empty initrd is okay: When the kernel boots up, it will just find nothing to do in the initrd and continue booting from the harddisk. The boot device is defined by the uboot bootloader image.

In both cased, put the intrd.buffallo into the current directory.

Perform the Update
Warning 1: This will delete all data on the root partition, including all /etc and /root. If you have valuable data there, put it on another computer first.

Warning 2: While this should only delete the root partition, make a backup of your data first.

Installmethod 1: Copy file to /boot
As Analysis of the ARM9 boot process shows, it's absolutely okay to simply copy the required files into /boot and reboot. Running LSUpdater in the end does the same, but using LSUdater is more cumbersome.


 * Still on your LS, working directory is where you've put hddrootfs.buffalo.updated intrd.buffallo

cp /boot/initrd.buffalo /boot/initrd.buffalo.orig mv /boot/hddrootfs.buffalo.updated.done /boot/hddrootfs.buffalo.updated.orig
 * You may want to make an (additional) backup of the original files. The update/boot process will create a copy, too, but will happily overwrite any existing. So it's better to have a reliable copy.

cp hddrootfs.buffalo.updated /boot/hddrootfs.buffalo.updated cp initrd.buffalo /boot/initrd.buffalo.updated
 * Now install the new files


 * Reboot

The *.updated files in /boot will be automatically picked up after the reboot and the new debootstrapped filesystem will be put in place. This is pretty much what LSUpdater itself does.


 * Now you are on Debian Squeeze!

Installmethod 2: Using LSupdater

 * Still on your LS: Move hddrootfs.buffalo.updated and the intrd.buffallo file to a folder that you can access from you computer.

Now continue on you Windows or OSX PC (unfortunately LSUpdater does not run on Linux, not even in Wine)


 * Go to your lsupdater folder.

[Flags] VersionCheck = 0 NoFormatting = 1 [specialflags] debug = 1
 * Remove initrd.img and hddrootfs.img from your lsupdater folder. (If you use 1.37mod1 kernel you just need to replace them when you copy these file)
 * Add debug options to lsupdate: open LSUpdater.ini and check that Flags and specialflags are set like this:


 * Copy hddrootfs.buffalo.updated and intrd.buffallo rom your LS.


 * Update your NAS (ignoring any errors about files not found), reboot.


 * Now you are on Debian Squeeze!


 * If you configured your nas before, some settings should be saved in a tgz file: /boot/conf_save.tgz

After install
If you are an experiened ssh-user, you may want to copy your public key to ease login. On a Unix/Linux system this is a breeze: ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@IPADDR

Install blstools: apt-get install smartmontools wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/blstools/releases/blstools-0.3.0.tar.gz tar zxf blstools-0.3.0.tar.gz cd blstools-0.3.0 ./install.sh

Modify /etc/init.d/lsmonitor (the line where HDDTEMP is defined) to: # Retrieve HDD temp HDDTEMP=$(smartctl -d marvell /dev/sda --all -T permissive | awk '$1 == "194" {print $10}')

Turn on bootlogging: # nano /etc/default/bootlogd BOOTLOGD_ENABLE=yes

Install xfs tools: apt-get install xfsprogs Configure timezone dpkg-reconfigure tzdata Install Debian security updates. Edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following line: deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free Then install security upgrades apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Some other cleanup
Some other stuff you may want to do after installation. Warning: Check by your own whether you want to do this!

rm /etc/motd.tail apt-get install less file apt-get install --no-install-recommends emacs23-nox