Fake Intel SS4200-E

C

charlesshoults

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 18, 2008
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I saw the Intel NAS device on newegg a couple weeks ago. I've been wanting to offload some of my data for a while and have played around with FreenAS, OpenFiler as well as setting up an Ubuntu Server box with just a basic NFS share. The Intel device looks like a pretty nice little deal but I wondered how the thing was set up, and what modifications could be made to it.

After doing much hunting, I discovered that Intel has a download file available for use in the event that the NAS suffers drive failure. A link is provided at the end of this post. It sounds as though the NAS boots from a DOM module connected to the first IDE channel. The software from Intel writes a bootable image to a USB thumb drive of 256MB or more. It then gives directions on how to get the NAS to boot from the thumb drive, and overwrite the DOM.

Wanting to test it out before spending $150 on a NAS, I took an old Dell GX270 and plugged in an 80GB hard drive to the first IDE channel, disconnected the optical drive and left the SATA drive attached. I had to tell the BIOS to boot from USB because after all, it's an old and dumb Dell with an extremely basic bios.

I give it a 30% chance of working, a 50% chance of refusing to install on hokey hardware, a 15% chance of installing but failing to boot and a 5% chance of burning something out.

On another Windows machine, I created a bootable image on a 512MB SD card, then booted the Dell from that image. It brought up a shamrock and said Slax loading please wait. After the installation finished, the computer automatically shuts off. I unplugged the USB stick and turned the computer back on. As this was a test and it still tries to boot to SATA, I had to press F12 and manually select Primary IDE Master. It then cycled through the linux sequence and stopped at a prompt.

I installed the Intel Entry Storage System software on a Windows machine and launched it. It brings up a few screens explaining how to bring the NAS online, then confirms that it was able to locate the device. However, it next brings up an error message stating that "The 'storage' storage device cannot currently be reached" and gives options of Ok and Delete. Selecting Delete goes through the process again. Clicking Ok, brings a more useful screen with a link for updating the device. After the update, it allows a login. The system is online and for the most part, working.

Because there is only one SATA drive in the Dell, the disks are forever listed in a Faulted state and most functions of the NAS are disabled. These functions include adding users accounts, upgrading firmware and lots of others. However, even getting this far has me extremely hopeful. I'm going to try the same process again on an XFX 630i-7150. It has four SATA ports on the board.

As far as I've gotten so far, I now give it a 60% chance of working and a 40% chance of remaining in a Faulted state after all four drives are attached.

In case you want to try this out yourself:
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/ss4200-e/sb/cs-029094.htm
 
I actually have the NAS your talking about I bet.. the one with the celeron right? I bought it as a christmas present for my parents + a WD live box.. if you want me to test something I will do it for you since I gotta setup the system before giving it to them..
 
The installer method doesn't appear to work with all kinds of hardware. On the XFX board, it goes through the process just like on the Dell, but once it's all done, the onboard NIC is never activated. To test the board to make sure everything was still working, I booted to the Ubuntu 9.10 CD and it activated the NIC once it loaded up, but the Slax used by the Intel imaging utility doesn't seem to like it. It doesn't show up in any ARP tables or within DHCP leases on my pfsense router, or through a direct connection to my MacBook.

I have an Athlon 64 board I'll try it on next.

I read that the official Intel NAS requires either two or four hard drives, not one, not three. If two drives are installed, they automatically get configured as a RAID-1 (stripe). If four drives are installed, it configures them as RAID-5 (parity), but afterward, configuration can be changed to RAID-1+0, which with only four drives, might be a strange thing to do. If I can ever get networking to function, I have a pair of SIL1334 cards and I'm interested to find out if the four drive limitation is a function of only having four connectors, or a software-controlled limit.
 
It stands to reason that Intel would have built a custom kernel for their appliance. Since Dell uses primarily Intel hardware, especially on their business lines, that probably explains why it works properly there. Every OptiPlex that I've bothered to check has an Intel NIC and Intel chipset, which is likely all Intel built drivers for into the kernel. I suspect you'll have trouble with anything else, though tossing an Intel NIC (might need to be a PCIe GigE model like in the SS4200-E, but it's fairly reasonable to expect others to work too, even 100mbit might work) may get you up and running. As far as adding a SATA controller, I'm pretty dubious that would work for the same reason, and you can't just drop in a card with the ICH chipset on it in that case ;).

One possible solution might be if Intel has either published (as part of the GPL package) or otherwise (/proc/config perhaps?) and if you have access to a console, or I guess you could mount the disk via a LiveCD or something and modify it, you should be able to build a compatible loadable module for whatever hardware you want. Put it in the appropriate spot and rig up a mechanism to load it and it just might work.

All speculation of course... do try it out and let us know how it goes. I'm curious as well.

Very late edit: Actually those Silicon Image controllers might just work; the Intel board itself uses a similar chip, probably the same kernel module.
 
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I think keenan is right. It didn't work with the Athlon 64 board either. Before trying the Athlon, I tried putting in an old 4-port Intel 10/100 card, but it wouldn't see a connection either. But that was before I figured out how to get into the command line. I went up to work to see if I could find an Intel-based card, but no such luck. So far, I've identified that 3Com, Broadcom and Digital cards don't work.

To get into the command line, use "root" as the username and "soho" as the password, or if the system has already been up and running and an admin password has been created, the password will be "soho" + admin password. Looking at config files, we find that the software is based on Fedora, so terminal commands are fairly straightforward. The module used to set up networking is e1000, so whatever network card is used, needs to be based on the Intel(R) PRO/1000 family. (Most likely. Turns out that some Celeron processors belong to an E1000 series.) In any case, it looks like I'll be buying a network card. I'll probably pick up a PCI and a PCI-E 1x and try both.
 
e1000 is definitely the module for Intel PRO/1000 ethernet. It should support any PCI/PCI-X devices, but PCIe ones, at least in newer kernels, mostly use the e1000e module instead. However, the 82573 apparently used on the SS4200-E is a PCIe device, so if the e1000 driver is being used, it might be an older version that contains support for both PCI and PCIe devices before they were split to separate drivers - however this means a newly purchased PCIe card with a newer chip might not be supported either. YMMV, but see if you can find an older PCIe card or look in the output of the 'dmesg' command and find the version of the module used and look up what's supported in that version. You might need to dig into the actual source and find the list of PCI ids to really be sure, Intel changes these fairly often on their cards, so even a supported chip might not work. Any PCI or PCI-X card will almost certainly work fine.

Curious that they used Fedora for the appliance but Slax for the install CD.
 
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