Geeks are GREAT Lovers

Turns out my attempts to hack the latest UPG file were all for nothing.  I found that the previous documentation on the UPG file format can all pretty much be scrapped due to the introduction of bcrypt to the whole mix.  I spent about 3 hours trying to figure out why all of the old files could be picked apart using dd and the new one wasn’t working the same way.  The ingenious people at Promise decided to bcrypt the upgrade file.  This wouldn’t be so bad if the key was available somewhere, its not.  I had to move the upgrade file to the NAS, change the extension to .pef (Promise Encrypted File?) and then run the local bcrypt on it (from command line on the NAS).  This gave me the file with the usual padding as expected.  I went ahead and edited some of the files in the UPG and packed everything up, moved the file to the NAS, bcrypt’ed it again and told the NS4300N to use it to upgrade itself.  To my utter suprise, it did just that.  Everything ran like a top and everything got unpacked, copied, and on reboot, the NS4300N became a doorstop.  I wish I knew exactly what happened but I don’t.  My guess is that some permissioning somewhere wasn’t kept correctly, but I can’t be 100% certain on that.

Good news is my unit was less than a year old and the good people at Promise sent me a brandy new one (RMA).  Bad news is, I had to blow everything away on my old RAID to get it running.  I’m in the process of copying all of my music over now.  So, back to the drawing board on the upgrade hacking.  I do have an updated MediaTomb package in the works that I have tested on my new server which  provides for rsyncd, admin telnet access and sudo permissions.  I’m working directly with the guys developing mediatomb and should have an unofficial package out after they release 0.12.0 in December ‘08.

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I’ve had mine for about 9 months and have done everything I can to hack in to it with varying success.  I’ve gotten telneted in to it and enabled rsync so that I can keep my music synchronized from my Linux laptop to it.  My wife backs up her Windows Vista laptop to it nightly and it just runs.  The native UPnP server that comes with it fuppes is good (especially with the latest update v1.01.0000.01) but I found that mediatomb is much more functional and recently found a package for it here.  I’d like to keep it updated so I am going to start to do that here hopefully with the help of the mediatomb developers.  You can download it from here.  There is some information on the contents of the ppg file here.  I’m going to try to hack the upg package (SR5 is out now) to see if I can get it to write the changes I make as part of the mediatomb service start permanent.  If it works out I will post the hacked UPG file here.

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