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October 18, 2005

Kuro-Box

Buffalo Kuro Box
I've recently been intrigued by the amount and variety of embedded linux devices. Upon looking for information regarding the roku soundbridge and slimdevices squeezebox I stumbled onto a new scene. Hacking the embedded Linux NAS devices. It seems people are hacing into these devices, upgrading/altering them to do more then the initial intent. Not only can these devices be a NAS server, but they can be more advanced music servers. With the newer downstream hardware clients out, there is a need for more advanced servers. It sure is great to have a server use the very basic SMB file access mechanism, yet not everone designs thier systems around that. The audiotron was one of the first mainstream products. Yes I owned one, but quickly felt it's limitiation on 10,000 MP3's (I have 40,000). I sure wish they had opened sourced it as it the audiotron was one of the best hardware user interface I've seen. So, during the search I've come across 2 interesting devices. Buffalo's Linkstation and Cisco/Linksys's NSLU2. If you know me, I got both to play around with.

Friday night my Kuro-Box arrived and I got to hack it all weekend (sorry trish).

Let me tell you this, It's a pretty cool box for the price. All you do is add a 3.5" hard drive of your choice. Boot up a special way, set up partitions, format, FTP an image and you are done.

It's a full linux environment on the Power PC. 128M Ram, network adapter, 2 USB ports in a self contained box the size of a small toaster. Even the power cord is attached.

It took a while to get this unit going. Although there used to be alot of information out there, the main site that had it was hacked and ruined due to a security flaw in phpBB. *sigh*.
In any case there is a Wiki that has alot of information here http://www.kurobox.com

Once the images/zips/ipkg's were installed I had a full gcc environment to put anything I had the source code for on the box.

I quickly installed, all the core GNU utilties, SSH, RSYNC, NAGIOS and a few others.
Imporant for me was the ability to use this as an offload device for my main linux workstations.
I then decided to offload my network monitoring to the lil guy.
I also added MT-DAAPD/ so it could be an itunes server for the ROKU SoundBridge and a Samba server for the ROKU HD1000. Now I can access segments of my music when I am doing work on my file server.

Kuro Box Pretends to be Toaster

It's a handly lil toaster sized box to have around as you can attach USB hard drives to it for more offline storage.
I even have a Tritton external USB with a card reader that was accesible.

So for the $200 + hard drive investment I have a tiny lil linux box capable of many services.

Something to really consider these days.

Next up is playing with the NSLU2 and getting a complete NAGIOS in a box environment running from a Compact Flash or 2.5" USB/IDE drive.

I'm also considering the addition of USB audio and festival to have a vocal alert system for NAGIOS. This is something I have today, but would sure love to move it off my linux box and onto an offboard box.

I have some gallery pictures of the device in the extended entry if anyone is interested.
You can also read alot more detail about this device on Tom's Networking Page

RESOURCES

KuroBox Wiki
Penguin PC Article
Tom's Hardware Article
Another Informative Wiki
Engadget Article
The Technologist Corner Part 1
The Technologist Corner Part 2
The Technologist Corner Part 3