Flugphase

Once my RAM arrives, I will have a four node private cluster consisting of

• 4 x Intel NUC-Kit D34010WYK
• 4 x CT102464BF1339 (Crucial 8GB DDR3 1333 MT/s PC3-10600 / SODIMM 204pin / CL9)
• 4 x Samsung MZ-MTE120BW mSATA SSD 120GB
• an GB ethernet switch and some patch cables

The plan is to build that into a case – an executive briefcase – or one of those bad ass sniper rifle cases. Use cases include

• usage distcc nodes for my embedded device experiments
• experimenting with Ubuntu MAAS
• building and testing a distributed/ multi node database setup
• … whatever comes up thereafter ;-)

One time… one single time… I’d like to have vendors post EXACTLY what version they used to base their published code on. I am trying to single out the changes from the vanilla 3.3.4 kernel to the 3.3.4 kernel made available for download by Buffalo – hard to do, when there are a gazillion changes that are not related to buffalo’s code!

Working on my raspberry pi, I found a way to free my LinkStation LS-WXL from it’s chains. The Buffalo firmware does a nice job if you’re using it as it’s supposed to – a windows NAS, but it’s a bit more pain when one’s using mainly linux.

I managed to hack the nas_configen script to enable the samba unix extensions, but it still lacks features that only NFS could provide.

So, how is it done? You’ll need a linux machine (I’m using Ubuntu 14.04). You will have to install qemu-user-static – it’s comparable to wine, in that it will provide a chroot environment for ARM executables.

apt-get install qemu-user-static

Next step is to create a debian bootstrap environment (be sure to choose a mirror near you):

sudo apt-get install debootstrap
sudo qemu-debootstrap --arch armel wheezy chroot-lswxlcdc-armel http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian/
sudo mount -t proc proc chroot-lswxlcdc-armel/proc
sudo mount -t sysfs sysfs chroot-lswxlcdc-armel/sys
sudo mount -o bind /dev chroot-lswxlcdc-armel/dev
sudo mount -o bind /dev/pts chroot-lswxlcdc-armel/dev/pts

Copy your /etc/resolv.conf into the chroot etc directory.
Create a suitable /etc/apt/sources.list
Change into the new chroot and do

apt-get update && apt-get install gcc make libncurses5-dev

(and some other tools later).
Grab the buffalo kernel source from http://opensource.buffalo.jp/ls-x-165.html. Copy mv88f6281_defconfig from the linux source defconfig directory (<linux source>/arch/arm/config/mv88f6281_defconfig) to <linux source>/.config and start „make menuconfig“. Make sure to include btrfs, ext4 and nfs support (if you want it).

Build the kernel with:

make && make uImage && make modules && make modules_install

The kernel will be in arch/arm/boot/uImage, the modules in binaries/lib/modules – copy both to the linkstation (uImage.buffalo) and /lib/modules/…

Once the kernel is built and copied (you probably had to install some more tools along the way – plus I had to make links for /usr/bin/gcc to /usr/bin/arm-none-linux.gnueabi-gcc and some other tools)

ln -s /usr/bin/ar /usr/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-ar
ln -s /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc
ln -s /usr/bin/ld /usr/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-ld
ln -s /usr/bin/nm /usr/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-nm
ln -s /usr/bin/objcopy /usr/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-objcopy
ln -s /usr/bin/objdump /usr/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-objdump
ln -s /usr/bin/size /usr/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-size

Reboot and cross your fingers!