Hi there,
After a lot of messing (days rather than minutes) around I finally managed to get OpenMediaVault running on my GoFlex Net, wasn't easy, certainly took a lot longer than I expected with a multitude of things to learn/fix, quite frustrating at times. I thought I'd share what I learnt, perhaps useful for others. I'm not much skilled at Howtos etc, so you'll have to do your own googling/trawling same as I had to, mostly just wanted to share that it's possible and some of the considerations.
Flash memory and Linux filesystems - SD cards and micro SD cards don't seem to like Linux filesystems. I have a preference for Sandisk as I have found them reliable in the past. I was NOT ABLE to get a bootable rootfs on SD card, and have had problems with Linux on SD card before. Article I found said that basically SD card designed to be FAT or FAT32 filesystem formatted, and if formatted with anything else well not good, it messes with their Chi or something, who knows, bottom line it doesn't work. So I ended up with a Sandisk Cruzer 4GB (USB Flash drive) which seems to work OK with ext2 or ext3. I have now replaced this with a Sandisk Cruzer Fit 8GB, which seems to be working OK at the moment on ext3.
Jeff Doozan's put debian on your GoFlexNet - Basically it doesn't work. It reflashed my GoFlex so possible to boot off USB, but neither the wheezy or squeeze installers produced a bootable USB stick, and I remember both crapping out with errors. After a lot of messing around I found davygravy's rootfs for his NSA320 and was able to get my GoFlex Net to boot off that, so I had a working SSH again, phew it wasn't bricked after all.
I'm not quite ready to dispense with the built in PogoPlug linux, so didn't want to install the Rescue System (although probably possible to back it up and reflash it later ?). I wasn't sure that OMV would work with newer linux kernel, wheezy rather than squeeze.
I found a post that described how to put GoFlex Net back to original U-Boot, which enables me to boot into the pogoplug linux, if I wish (http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,11070,11085#msg-11085 this is the goflex net original uboot, should use this rather than the doozan u-boot page which says for dockstar)
Initally I tried to install OMV onto davygravy's NSA320 rootfs (http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,7806), but had a lot of package problems so eventually abandoned, days of my life I will never get back ! At the time it didn't make sense to me having a 3.x linux kernel on squeeze installation, but may have missed something here?
Then I found vlad's built your own rootfs guide (http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,5986), very thorough well written, although there are a couple of inconsistencies towards the end (I'm still chroot'ed in Ubuntu and he's asking me to run commands on the GoFlex). I managed to build a rootfs using vlad's script. But again I got doozan'ed the doozan kernel referenced in vlad's post just didn't boot. He also mentioned varkey's kernel, so I downloaded the varkey .deb package and installed that kernel, whilst chroot'ed into the rootfs .img file. So I managed to produce a working rootfs squeeze debian/varkey kernel. All of this done in Ubuntu installation in VirtualBox VM on Windows 7.
OMV vault had a couple of issues with install, collectd daemon is a bit crap, needs to have IP address and hostname in /etc/hosts file or it freaks out, so needed to do this (it's described on the OMV pogoplug howto). Also there's some messing around with getting a version of xmlstartlet that works with OMV, that is on the OMV/pogoplug howto (http://forums.openmediavault.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=514)
Once I had OMV up and running, I wanted the miniDLNA. To get this I needed to do some messing around with installing a plugin for OMV-Plugins.org which are some plugins that are maintained outside of OMV.
OpenMediaVault, so far seems to work quite well on GoFlex Net. Linux also doesnt seem to get on very well with NTFS, so transfer speeds I have tried so far were up 20MB/s which is OK. What I am doing now is setting up Raid 1 with a couple of Seagate 1TB backup plus drives.
The fw_setenv to 3089 seems to be important for things to work properly, well at least for the LED to tell you when it's booted OK. Oh and vlad's calling the rootfs partition "rootfs" and updating the U-Boot fw_setenv to force boot off USB "rootfs" a good idea, otherwise soon as you connect SATA drives doesnt boot off USB anymore.
Be interested to know if anyone else managed to get OMV up and running and what their experiences are ...
OMV in my understanding only runs on squeeze, has anyone tried on wheezy, does it work ? which kernel did you use ?
OK, hopefully helpful to someone, save them a bit of time or give them a bit of hope that it does actually work :)
Cheers,
Mastrov Muppez
PS. I'm experienced IT wise, but not much knowledgable about linux or embedded systems. It would have been really useful if someone could have torrented a working rootfs for GoFlex Net with a tested known good kernel, a short howto of how to get it on a USB stick. I really don't have the experience to know what's good and what's not, so wouldn't want to do it myself. Anyone ?
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/30/2013 02:17PM by tabernacle.