Thecus NASs: N2200EVO, N4100Pro, and managing DOMs

[waynosworld]

I don't even know what your post means, but thankyou for keeping this site going. wayne

[plenzen]

Ever see the movie K-Pax ???

Me thinks that Al's real name is Prot.

( if you didn't see the movie, K-pax is a planet and Prot is a visitor ).


Thanks for keeping us alive Al.

[asavage]

Every so often -- measured in months -- the N4100Pro will lose the old LanMan password and while the 'asavage' user is still showing in the NAS' web interface, the OS/2 box cannot log in to it. That means no backups happen. As of today, this has happened twice (in about six months).

It happened again, sometime in the past week. That script saved my bacon; it's so much easier to fix this when I take good notes!

[asavage]

Although undocumented, the N4100Pro seems to work OK in RAID1 with 8TB drives.

Existing two-drive 6TB RAID1: pull one drive, insert one 8TB drive, wait 20 hours for rebuild. When finished, pull the second 6TB drive, insert the second 8TB drive, wait another 20 hours, then use the web interface to expand the 6TB RAID to 8TB. No problem.

I've been running 8TB drives for a couple of months now.

[plenzen]

As always.

Thank you.

[asavage]

I try to rotate out hard drives every couple of years. The N4100Pro got twin 8TB drives (RAID1) two years ago, and I decided to change to twin 16TB drives last week (got a deal on them). House backups are using space, what with video & such, and it seemed a good time to gain some.

I used the same procedure as last time: pulled out one 8TB drive, plugged in a 16TB drive: wait around two days to resilver the new drive. Repeat for the second drive. Then tell the NAS to expand the RAID to use the new space. While it takes a long time, it worked fine (again).

Long-term, this N4100Pro will probably become a backup store. Now that Ubuntu has integrated ZFS as a kernel-space filesystem (instead of the user-land FUSE method they'd been experimentally using for years), I don't see the need for a dedicated ZFS NAS anymore, and I'll likely just use the main webserver as our house NAS as well. I don't need the horsepower of another Dell T7500 just to hold up a NAS, when the webserver HP Z620 would handle the added load of being a NAS just fine.

[asavage]

I purchased a "spare" Thecus N4100Pro. It arrived without login credentials, and I was able to glean info from the 'net to reset it to defaults. Not easy, because this model does NOT have a hardware reset button.

After a lot of effort, I was unable to convince it to accept a firmware upgrade to 5.03.02.8 (I think a file of that version is here) , the last available firmware for this model. At the GUI, it would churn for a while and eventually yield an error.

These units store their OS on a DOM: Disk on Module. It's a type of flash storage or SSD, which uses the 44-pin IDE connector, as do most 2.5" laptop hard disks. I ended up cloning the DOM from my "old" N4100Pro to my new one, side-stepping the problem with the OS itself rejecting the firmware upgrade.

This wasn't easy enough for me to make good guesses, and there's surprisingly little good info available on this via Google. Most information assume you'll be plugging the DOM into a suitable mainboard and reading/writing to it from there.

I use a $40 StarTech USB to 2.5"/3.5" SATA/IDE all-purpose converter (USB3SSATAIDE) for a lot of HD and SSD cloning and upgrades. I've used this thing for years, and it's great for this kind of thing. Problem is, DOMs have a 44-pin female connector and 2.5" hard disks have a male connector. The mismatched gender thing threw me for a long time. I kept staring at the connectors and failing to see how to mate them correctly.

"Gender changer", you say? Not so fast. You cannot just use, say, a header row of straight-through pins (I tried: smoke!). Here's the N4100Pro DOM:

Thecus N410Pro DOM

Thecus_N4100Pro_DOM_02b.jpg (1.36 MiB) Viewed 10151 times

Look at a typical 2.5" 44-pin HDD's pinout, and how it mates to the StarTech Converter:

StarTech converter, and IDE HDD pinout

StarTech_USBUSB3SSATAIDE_01-1b.png (1.07 MiB) Viewed 10150 times

But Pin 1 on the DOM is on the wrong row. On this DOM, the top & bottom rows are reversed from a standard 2.5" HDD, AND the solder pads on the back of the DOM are also reversed. Tricky.

Thecus N410Pro DOM, Front & Back showing header row reversal.

Thecus_N4100Pro_DOM_01b.jpg (1.83 MiB) Viewed 10130 times

The way to connect this DOM to the StarTech Converter (or anything other than a mainboard that's wired for a DOM, I guess) is this adapter: Amazon JXSZ 2.5" IDE PATA DOM 44-Pin(43pin) Male to 44-Pin(43pin) Male IDE 44pin M-M Adapter

JXSZ W90551 44-pin IDE DOM adapter @ Amazon

JXSZ_W90551_DOM_Adapter_03b.png (222.7 KiB) Viewed 10151 times

JXSZ W90551 44-pin IDE DOM adapter

JXSZ_W90551_DOM_Adapter_01b.jpg (922.7 KiB) Viewed 10151 times

JXSZ W90551 44-pin IDE DOM adapter

JXSZ_W90551_DOM_Adapter_02b.jpg (897.98 KiB) Viewed 10151 times

Thecus N410Pro DOM, Adapter, StarTech converter

Thecus_N4100Pro_DOM_06b.jpg (495.31 KiB) Viewed 10151 times

Thecus N410Pro DOM, Adapter, StarTech converter

Thecus_N4100Pro_DOM_07b.jpg (636.67 KiB) Viewed 10151 times

That JXSZ W90551 adapter flips the rows of the header as it changes the gender. Try to find that adapter anywhere in a hurry . . . at this time, it's almost unobtainium if you are in a hurry. I waited three weeks to get one via Amazon, and it is the perfect tool for this job.

---

After getting the physical connector to read/write to the DOM sorted out, and obtaining a spare DOM, then I had to read from the DOM with the newer firmware, write to a file, then swap DOMs in the StarTech converter and write the file to the DOM.

To read from the source DOM, I first used the Ubuntu GUI utility Disks to find which disk name Ubuntu gave it when I plugged the converter into a USB port. These days, Linux enumerates disks sort of alphabetically, eg /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc. There are many, many ways of determining what identifier Linux assigns to storage media, with the lsblk command being one of the easier ones. However, with Ubuntu's adoption of snap packaging and runtime environment the system now adds "loops" to /dev ; my system has around 29 of them, this makes reading lsblk output difficult and error-prone. Give me a GUI and a nice picture instead. This screenshot shows the Afaya/Thecus DOM selected in Disks, with the "/dev/sda" highlighted:

Linux GUI "Disks" utility

Thecus_N4100Pro_DOM_08b.png (108.66 KiB) Viewed 10139 times

Using that, I know how Linux labelled the Avaya/Thecus N4100Pro DOM in the StarTech converter that's feeding the PC via USB. Below is how I read the contents of the DOM and write it to a file:

Code: Select all

asavage@Ubuntu1:~/Documents$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=./N4100-backup-5.03.02.8.bin status=progress bs=16M
[sudo] password for asavage: 
128188416 bytes (128 MB, 122 MiB) copied, 9 s, 13.7 MB/s
7+1 records in
7+1 records out
128188416 bytes (128 MB, 122 MiB) copied, 9.33918 s, 13.7 MB/s

I then swapped out the Thecus DOM from the StarTech converter, for a spare DOM I'd picked up from eBay for $6 for this purpose. Then reverse the if and of of the dd command, and it writes from the file to the new DOM:

Code: Select all

asavage@Ubuntu1:~/Documents$ sudo dd of=/dev/sda if=./N4100-backup-5.03.02.8.bin status=progress bs=16M
7+1 records in
7+1 records out
128188416 bytes (128 MB, 122 MiB) copied, 23.7036 s, 5.4 MB/s

Like many things in life: easy . . . once you know how.

[asavage]

27Nov2020 ALS

Steps to reset web GUI & SSH password on Thecus N4100Pro, which does not have a hardware reset button.

Adapted from:
https://thecus.kayako.com/knowledgebase ... grade-tool

Prepare a USB drive, formatted FAT or FAT32

Download https://www.dropbox.com/s/osofnpscd4gfh ... 2.zip?dl=1 (alternate: ftp://asavage.dyndns.org/Drivers/Thecus ... .0.9.2.zip)

Which contains five files:

Code: Select all

factory_test.sh  
xusb_reset_passwd  
xusb_reset_default  
usb_upgrade
readMe-32bit.txt  

Copy the first four files to the USB drive's root folder (the readme.txt is not needed, but it won't hurt).

Optional (since we're not upgrading the firmware): Download the last firmware available for the N4100Pro to the USB root folder:http://www.thecus.com/Downloads/FW/N410 ... .03.02.zip (alternate: ftp://asavage.dyndns.org/Drivers/Thecus ... .03.02.zip). Note: I was unable to successfully get this version of firmware to be pushed to the device via this USB stick method.
Unzip it to extract N4100PRO_FW_5.03.02.rom

The way the factory_test.sh script works is by looking at the filenames above, for the first one that begins with "usb", so:

• If you want to update FW, rename from "xusb_upgrade" to "usb_upgrade" (and copy firmware upgrade file to USB root folder as above).
• If you want to Reset to Factory Defaults, rename from "xusb_reset_default" to "usb_reset_default".
• If you want to Reset the root (GUI + SSH) password, rename from "xusb_reset_passwd" to "usb_reset_passwd".

The above 3 functions CANNOT be executed together at the same time!

So, to reset the password, deactivate usb_upgrade by renaming it to xusb_upgrade, and activate xusb_reset_passwd by renaming it to reset_passwd .

Power off NAS.

Plug USB into NAS and power up.

It will take a few minutes to go through "Configuring Network" etc., then it will read from the USB drive, reset the password, and power off automatically.

Remove USB drive.

Power up NAS. When it finishes booting, root (GUI, SSH) password will be "admin".

--end

[Bithellio]

I dont suppose anyone still has a link to these files that asavage posted anywhere? .. ive just tried to bring my old n4100pro back from the dead and i want to restore to factory before use . the guide looks really helpful i just cant get the files

[asavage]

I lost the backed-up copy of the DOM code in a HDD crash (sent the drive off to a drive recovery specialist, but for $1200 they couldn't recover some specific files I'd wanted, so I told them to toss the drive).

The other links I've posted above seem to still work. Is there something you're not finding?