Terastation blues
No, its not some long lost Bob Dylan song. A Buffalo Terastation is essentially a NAS box, of which I own and also recently found out runs Linux 
Last week I hacked into it (using excellent info from here) and got root access by replacing the firmware with a hacked version. This means potentially I now have an extremely useful Linux box which I never knew I had!
So far I’ve upgraded samba to version 3 which has made a huge difference in disk sharing performance - can’t believe it! I’ve also installed TwonkyVision UPnP media server which allows media files on the terastation e.g. music, movies, pictures to be streamed to any UPnP capable device on the network, such as some unnameable games consoles that support HD TV…
My aim today was to try and get rtorrent working on the TS but this turned out to be a much bigger job than I’d anticipated. The software has to be compiled from source for use on the TS PowerPC processor and kernel. So far I’ve managed to get most of the dev toolkit onto the TS, and have all the source code ready. In order, I think need to compile:
- libsigc++-2.0.0
- libTorrent
- rTorrent
Everything was going according to plan until I tried to compile libsigc++-2.0.0 and realised there was no space on the TS hda1 partition. This is a relatively small partition just used for system files, but with the PPC dev tools installed there isn’t any space left! Going to have to work out how to free some up, or even possibly the scary option of (oooohh!) wiping the system partition and reinstalling another Linux… Could be dangerous.
