Installation of a vanilla debian on a MyBook Live NAS.
The MyBook Live is hardware wise a pretty nice NAS, featuring an embedded powerpc board and gigabit ethernet. The standard installation is a mix of debian squeeze and wheezy and comes with dlna / air play software, ftp, smb and afp access, all configurable through a web interface. It cannot be easily upgraded to wheezy though. If you don’t need the dlna software and are interested in installing software for a more ‘recent’ system, here we go. Furthermore, we obtain security patches directly from debian instead of relying on infrequent firmware upgrades.
The system partition is a raid 1 such that upgrades can be rolled back. We will use one of the two RAID 1 partitions for our new system in this guide. The installation is based on the writeup from loetzimmer.de with some adaptions and a custom kernel build. Kernel builds are along the guide from Alex Ryzhof.
First we will determine which partition is usable as our new system partition. Parted should produce some similar output:
Gondor:/boot# parted
GNU Parted 2.2
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) p
Model: ATA WDC WD30EZRS-11J (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 3001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
3 15.7MB 528MB 513MB linux-swap(v1) primary
1 528MB 2576MB 2048MB ext3 primary raid
2 2576MB 4624MB 2048MB ext3 primary raid
4 4624MB 3001GB 2996GB ext4 primary
(parted)
We will use sda1 as our new root partition and thus remove it from the RAID 1. The RAID device can be
found out via proc filesystem:
Gondor:/boot# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md1 : active raid1 sda2[1] sda1[0]
1999808 blocks [2/2] [UU]
unused devices: <none>
In this case, it is md1 but other MyBook Live systems seem to have different device numbers. Lets first fail and remove sda1:
Gondor:/boot# mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --fail /dev/sda1
mdadm: set /dev/sda1 faulty in /dev/md1
Gondor:/boot# mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --remove /dev/sda1
mdadm: hot removed /dev/sda1 from /dev/md1
Now we can format the empty partition and mount it.
Gondor:/boot# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
Gondor:/boot# mkdir /newsys
Gondor:/boot# mount /dev/sda1 /newsys
RECOVERY: In case that something went wrong and you need to restore the original system, add sda1 to the raid and resync. If the system is unbootable, you have to do this by disassembling the MyBookLive and attaching the HD to an external Computer running Linux.
First we install debootstrap
Gondor:/tmp# wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.67_all.deb
Gondor:/tmp# dpkg -i debootstrap_1.0.67_all.deb
I had to import the new debian archive keys since the ones on my mybooklive were too old
Gondor:/tmp# gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 6FB2A1C265FFB764
Bootstrap the base system
Gondor:/tmp# debootstrap --arch powerpc wheezy /newsys/ http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian
Networking setup is achived by copying interfaces and resolv.conf and setting a hostname
Gondor:/tmp# cp /etc/network/interfaces /newsys/etc/network/
Gondor:/tmp# cp /etc/resolv.conf /newsys/etc/
Gondor:/tmp# echo 'gondor' > /newsys/etc/hostname
Edit /newsys/etc/apt/sources.list
Gondor:/tmp# vim /newsys/etc/apt/sources.list
Change content e.g. to:
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian stable-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian stable-updates main contrib non-free
For kernel compilation, the 2G default space are not enough, thus we bind-mount an external directory before chrooting.
Gondor:~# mkdir /DataVolume/shares/kernel
Gondor:~# mkdir /newsys/root/kernel
Gondor:~# mount -o bind /DataVolume/shares/kernel/ /newsys/root/kernel/
Mounting dev and proc:
Gondor:/tmp# mount -o bind /proc /newsys/proc/
Gondor:/tmp# mount -o bind /dev /newsys/dev/
Chroot …
Gondor:/tmp# chroot /newsys/
In the chroot, we install openssh-server and set a password for the root user
root@Gondor:/# apt-get update
root@Gondor:/# apt-get install openssh-server vim
root@Gondor:/# passwd
Newer versions of openssh in debian disallow password based login for the root user. Therefore we have to change the following line in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
PermitRootLogin: prohibit-password
to
PermitRootLogin: yes
Alternatively, you can place the public part of your ssh key in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys.
My choice is to mount the big data partition to /mnt/data, feel free to adjust.
root@Gondor:/# mkdir /mnt/data
Edit fstab:
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs rw,size=100M 0 0
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults,noatime,nodiratime 0 0
/dev/sda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda4 /mnt/data ext4 defaults,auto,noatime,nodiratime 0 0
These are mostly common options, the tmpfs size is limited since the MybookLive only has 256MB RAM.
In our chroot, we now install all the tools we require for kernel building and creation of th eu-boot bootloader entrypoint.
root@Gondor:~/kernel# apt-get install ca-certificates build-essential uboot-mkimage ncurses-dev unzip
Download and patch the kernel
root@Gondor:~/kernel# wget https://mbl-common.googlecode.com/svn/kernel_2.6.32-61/010-kernel_2.6-add-modules.builtin.patch
root@Gondor:~/kernel# wget https://mbl-common.googlecode.com/svn/kernel_2.6.32-61/001-kernel_2.6.32-61-APM82181-with-accept4.patch
root@Gondor:~/kernel# wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/longterm/v2.6.32/linux-2.6.32.65.tar.xz
root@Gondor:~/kernel# xz -dc linux-2.6.32.65.tar.xz | tar -x
root@Gondor:~/kernel# cd linux-2.6.32.65
root@Gondor:~/kernel/linux-2.6.32.65# patch -p1 -i ../001-kernel_2.6.32-61-APM82181-with-accept4.patch
root@Gondor:~/kernel/linux-2.6.32.65# patch -p1 -i ../010-kernel_2.6-add-modules.builtin.patch
Kernel building steps…
root@Gondor:~/kernel/linux-2.6.32.65# make distclean
root@Gondor:~/kernel/linux-2.6.32.65# make mrproper
root@Gondor:~/kernel/linux-2.6.32.65# make 44x/apollo_3G_nas_defconfig
root@Gondor:~/kernel/linux-2.6.32.65# make uImage
Copy the kernel image to its new location
root@Gondor:~/kernel/linux-2.6.32.65# cp arch/powerpc/boot/uImage /boot/
Build and install kernel modules
root@Gondor:~/kernel/linux-2.6.32.65# make modules
root@Gondor:~/kernel/linux-2.6.32.65# make modules_install
Create boot.cmd with following content
echo Boot from U-boot configuration
setenv md0_args 'setenv bootargs root=/dev/sda1 rw rootfstype=ext3 rootflags=data=ordered'
setenv load_sata 'sata init; ext2load sata 1:1 ${kernel_addr_r} /boot/uImage; ext2load sata 1:1 ${fdt_addr_r} /boot/apollo3g.dtb'
setenv boot_sata 'run load_sata; run md0_args addtty; bootm ${kernel_addr_r} - ${fdt_addr_r}'
echo ==== Loading Linux kernel, Device tree, Root filesystem ====
run boot_sata
Convert to binary bootloader config
mkimage -A powerpc -O linux -T script -C none -a 0 -e 0 -n 'Execute uImage' -d boot.cmd boot.scr
cp boot.scr /boot/
Exit the chroot via exit and copy the device tree blob in the new system.
Gondor:/boot# cp /boot/apollo3g.dtb /newsys/boot/
..and reboot :-)
Many thanks to Darren Strauss and Paul Trenholme for pointing out some issues in the original post.