Just sharing a story of some hacking I’ve been doing over the last few weeks…
Some of you may know, one of my NAS’s (a D-link DNS-322) died a few weeks back.. I was able to save much of the data, but not all. It was a very old box, so I’m not too upset that it died. What data I could salvage I farmed out to my other systems, but now I’m running out of disk space in several places.
As it happens, I have an old Windows Home Server (an Acer Aspire H341) with 4 hot-swappable bays collecting dust. I haven’t used it since I discovered Linux many years ago. The problem with the WHS is that it’s headless, i.e. no video.
So.. I took an old HDD and bought a USB>SATA converter. Originally, I tried to just hook up a live USB and the HDD to a laptop, but the Ubuntu installer insisted on wiping out the EFI partition on the laptop’s HDD. There is apparently some trick to get around that, but what I saw looked pretty scary, so I avoided it.
Next, I tried to use the Raspi disk imager app to load Ubuntu Server onto the HDD. The disk imager is actually a pretty slick app, but in this case wouldn’t work. I think it doesn’t like Atom CPUs..
Next, I remembered that in the garage I have a disk-less desktop that a friend from work asked me to take to the recycle centre (and I will someday!) I took the HDD and plugged it into the desktop via USB, added the live USB stick, wired the desktop up to one of my monitors and hooked up one of those tiny Bluetooth keyboards.. I could then load Ubuntu on to the HDD. Next step was to take said HDD over to the WHS and fire it up from there. The lights did what lights usually do, but for the life of me I couldn’t get the thing to talk to the network. I actually did a wipe and load at one point just to prove myself wrong, but I still couldn’t see the WHS on the network.
Eventually, I got the idea that maybe the built-in NIC (on the Acer) was buggerski. So I bought a USB<>Ethernet adapter and tried to get connectivity that way. Still no dice. I thought maybe the adapter doesn’t get magically picked up by the OS, so I brought the adapter and the HDD back to the desktop computer, found that the adapter was seen, but disabled. So using Netplan, (which I still don’t like), I configured it to talk to the adapter as the primary NIC (learned a lesson about having the gateway listed twice as well). I then ran the whole lot back to the WHS, booted it up and whammo, I can now SSH into it.
Sweet zombie servers, Batman! The WHS lives again!
Now to reorganize all the cables and crap that I scattered all over the place…
The only drawback, I think, is that the WHS only has USB 2, so not going to see 1gb speeds. That’ll hurt during the mass file copying, but I can probably live with it for regular duty work. And since there are four bays, I can use LVM to make one big pile for backups and whatnot.