Install Freenas On Iomega Storcenter Ix2

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Last year, I bought an Iomega ix2 NAS, a simple box which can hold 2 hard disks for network attached storage. Since then, the company was bought by Lenovo, which does the support now.

It was a pretty cheap deal, and came included with two 3 TB Seagate disks for having 6 TB of storage, or 3 TB in RAID 1. The product also cames in a “cloud” edition, which has some additional software tweaks, but is essentially the same hardware. Unfortunately, the out-of-the-box firmware has some serious issues.

Ix2

Iomega StorCenter NAS Storage, from home office, to small office, to SMB Distributed NAS Storage, Iomega by EMC offers desktop and rackmount Server Class scalable NAS Storage. From the px2-300d Desktop all the way up to the px12-450r 48TB 12 Bay rackmount NAS Storage and everything in between including the px4-300d, px6-300d, and px4-300r.

Install Freenas On Iomega Storcenter Ix2

Iomega Storcenter Ix2 Cloud Edition

  • View and Download Iomega Ix2-200 - StorCenter Network Storage NAS Server quick start manual online. Ix2-200 - StorCenter Network Storage NAS Server network hardware pdf manual download. Also for: Storcenter ix4-200d, Storcenter ix-series.
  • Feb 20, 2019 Iomega Storcenter Ix2 DlIomega Storcenter Ix2 SoftwareThis tutorial uses unsupported features of the IOMEGA Storcenter ix4-200d. It worked for me but use it at your own risk! It should work (again, it is unsupported) on the ix2 Storcenter as well.Install Freenas On Iomega Storcenter Ix 2 From NAS-Ce.

Here are some tips / remarks:

Storcenter

Install Freenas On Iomega Storcenter Ix2 200 Firmware

  • Upgrade the firmware as soon as you get this thing out of the box, and preferably before you connect it to the internet. Mine came out of the box with a 3.x version of the firmware. In order to upgrade to the newest (4.x) firmware, you’ve got to upgrade using ix2-ng-4.0.2.9960.tgz before updating to 4.1.114.3342 (the latest version at time of writing). Firmware can be found here. It’s a pretty hefty download (+200 Mb) and upgrading firmware can take a while (uploading the tarball to the device, extracting, installing, rebooting). Be prepared to wait.
    • Kudos to Lenovo for keeping this device up to date with latest patches for SSL and services running on it – not a lot of vendors doing this.
  • Configure access control: By default, the NAS allows any computer connected to your network to grab files. That’s generally a bad idea.
  • Disable the built-in media server: Last time I tested, the delivered Twonky media server in the firmware was an older version with a huge bug: if it encounters any file on the system with the .mp4 extension (a popular media format), the indexer will fail, and indexing will begin again. Indefinitely. I only noticed this after a few months. I thought the blinking blue led was indicating RAID check activity, and shrugged it off, but it was actively torturing my hard disks. This led to the machine running very hot and a hard disk failure after 4 months already. This might have been fixed in more recent firmware versions, but I would suggest not taking the gamble. Pretty pissed that this got into released firmware. If you’ve got a constant blinking blue light for days, find out what’s causing it.
  • SSH access: In order to get SSH access to this Linux box (yes, it runs a fairly old kernel: Linux 2.6.31.8 armv5tel), you need to enable diagnostics mode in the firmware. This is very vaguely explained in the documentation, but since 4.x you can set root password using the web interface. If your SSH connection still fails after setting this up, try logging in using soho+(yourpassword). So if your password is apples, log in using sohoapples. This is a leftover from the 3.x firmware.
  • If you want to do more with the box (have some standard tools, top, bash, nano, vim…) you can install fun_plug, a script allowing to install software and configure a shell. All info on the fun_plug homepage.
  • This thing has a pretty slow CPU, so response time can be long, especially when it’s already doing something (syncing RAID, …). Disable any services you don’t need.
  • This is /proc/cpuinfo:

Manual Iomega Storcenter Ix2

Iomega

After all the tweaking, the box now runs quietly, backing up my data over ssh.