[CDBUG-talk] NAS hardware - MaxAttach 3000

Mark Hutchinson m.hutchinson at mindspring.com
Sun Feb 10 17:26:41 EST 2008


I recently received a Maxtor MaxAttach 3000 that was trashed. The previous
owner was going to toss it out, but gave it to me instead. This unit is has
a pair of 80 Gig drives (73 Gigs) that (like most NAS's) can be set as
single volumes, simple JBOD for 143 Gigs or mirrored for a single 73 Gig
volumn. Turns out it runs FreeBSD.
 
uname -mrs shows: FreeBSD 2.05.3075.17 i386
 
I was able (after about 15 hours of research, reading, and turning up
exactly one thread on the unit, trial and error) to get the drives wiped,
and functional. The unit was down past 0% free (-4%, IIRC) which was part of
the difficulty in booting it, as nothing could be set or reset, and the
system had shown some corruption (User accounts were named in kanji and
high-ANSI chars)
 
It also has some limits that I thought someone may be able to tell me how to
work around.
 
1) One of the web interface management pages requires an old version of Java
(1.42 or older) and will not run on IE7. I'm using an old Win2000 box with
IE6 and MS-Java to change drive shares and security...
 
2) Appears to have a file size limit, I was going to use this to store DVD
.iso images, but it cannot handle 7 Gig images. I have not tried to see if
the limit is 2 Gig, but I suspect that's it. I'm not sure if this is SAMBA
related, or early FreeBSD related.
 
fdisk shows 3 partitions (sysid 90 - unknown, and two sysid 165 - FreeBSD),
on each of the drives (I would assume so that you can swap drives, or that
if the first fails, it can rebuild the OS/swap partitions from the second.
 
3) The upgrade for the box is an 11 Meg .pkg file. I suspect that it's
possible to fix issues, and repackage so that others with these units could
install the fixes using the built-in upgrade webpage...
 
What's the possibility to load something more modern on this, rather than
patching an older OS?
 
Here's some hw info from the box (it does support telnet - w00t!)
 
# dmesg | grep CPU
CPU: Pentium/P55C (quarter-micron) (267.27-MHz 586-class CPU)

# dmesg | grep memory
real memory  = 33554432 (32768K bytes)
avail memory = 29859840 (29160K bytes)
 
# dmesg | grep drive
cvd0-5: Concatenated disk drivers
supported drive: oemid=0x21, vendor=<Maxtor 98196H8>
supported drive: oemid=0x21, vendor=<Maxtor 98196H8>
 
Probing for devices on PCI bus 0:
chip0: <Intel 82439TX System Controller (MTXC)> rev 0x01 on pci0.0.0
chip1: <Intel 82371AB PCI to ISA bridge> rev 0x02 on pci0.7.0
ide_pci0: <Intel PIIX4 Bus-master IDE controller> rev 0x01 on pci0.7.1
chip2: <Intel 82371AB USB host controller> rev 0x01 int d irq 0 on pci0.7.2
chip3: <Intel 82371AB Power management controller!> rev 0x02 on pci0.7.3
fxp0: <Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100B Ethernet> rev 0x08 int a irq 10 on
pci0.10.0
 
So, basically an old Pentium TX-chipset Mobo with two hard drives on two
channels, running with 32 Megs of memory. The board itself can use upto 128
Megs (am reading that it will take a 256 Meg SODIMM, but only show 128
Megs).
 
Mark Hutchinson
 
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