NAS goodness!

[Dan]

Can somebody say storage!

I can't wait to get these babies fired up!

[Dan]

NAS Manual attached for your reading pleasure.

[Fred]

SWEET!!!

[johu]

I assume someone else pays your electricity bill. :) CX300 I installed back in early 2005 is still running and can't remember any unplanned outages due storage. Bunch of broken 73G 15k FC and 250G 7.2k SATA disks over the years tho. It's not bad device, especially after realizing that CX300 is simply Windows XP with software RAID running on 800MHz P3 or so. I don't know how familiar you're with it but you can login to SP with pcanywhere and goof around.

As for your PIX-506E it's intentionally restricted to old firmware versions by Cisco. PIX-515E which is based on same motherboard can run newer versions. Difference lies in bios chip that contains serial number and device model, 515E having double amount of flash (so no PDM on 506E after upgrade) and 515E having PCI riser for extra network interfaces.

I upgraded one 506E ages ago with 1GHz P3 (133 FSB) CPU that ran 750MHz due 100FSB limitation of Intel 440BX based PIX-506E/515E and added few 128MB dimms from same old Compaq that donated CPU. Then I patched 8.0(4) firmware to support 506E hardware. That was easy part, just do search-and-replace on code after unpacking it and change all occurances of 506E to XXXX and then another pass with 515E to 506E. After that firmware will think it's running on 515E and won't crash on boot like it's told to do when detecting 506E. You'll also get few VLANs more as base license for 515E is more permissive than base for 506E. Original activation code will still work.

After editing firmware you can either recalculate checksums for patched firmware or disable checksum checks. Below some of my notes from over 5 years ago I managed to dig up. That'll take care of checksums and allows one to freely modify firmware in future. There's always recovery possibility via bootloader and going back to 7.0 series firmware so it's not permanent modification.

Code: Select all

# First we need to extract loader for PIX 8.0(4) firmware, it's ends at 0x19000
dd if=pix804.bin of=pix804.bin.loader bs=102400 count=1

# Extract rest of firmware, starts at 0x19000
dd if=pix804.bin of=pix804.bin.lzma bs=102400 skip=1

# There's footer at the end of image in offset 0x72a5d0 (7513552) we need as well
dd if=pix804.bin of=pix804.bin.footer bs=7513552 skip=1

# Extract LZMA image
lzma d pix804.bin.lzma pix804.bin.uncompressed

# Modify extracted image as needed and recompress. New image can't be bigger
# than old one when using this method to hack firmware.

# This time we only remove CRC check from image to make further hacks possible
# Copy pix804.bin.uncompressed to pix804.bin.uncompressed-hacked
cp pix804.bin.uncompressed pix804.bin.uncompressed-hacked

# Open pix804.bin.uncompressed-hacked in hex editor

# This will skip entire call to check validity of image.
# Offset 0x15bd0
# Old    00 e8 42 84 1f 01 85 c0 0f 84 c4 01 00 00 8b 45
# New    00 eb 03 84 1f 01 85 c0 0f 84 c4 01 00 00 8b 45
#
# There's another check when new flash image is saved to flash
# Offset 0xabde0
# Old    08 8d 45 b8 8d 55 d4 89 44 24 04 89 14 24 e8 c5
# New    08 8d 45 b8 8d 55 d4 89 44 24 04 89 14 24 eb 03
#
# PIX Flash Load Helper contains check as well
# Offset 0x1358d80
# Old    25 0f b7 43 28 50 53 57 e8 40 bf 00 00 83 c4 0c
# New    25 0f b7 43 28 50 53 57 eb 03 bf 00 00 83 c4 0c
#
# I also recommend searching
# for "MB RAM" and changing it to "MB-RAM" or something like that so you can see your
# PIX is actually running your custom fw right from start in case something goes wrong
# and it crashed early on boot.

# Compress image using LZMA. Default parameters are usually fine, but it's possible that
# your patched image turns out bigger than stock causing problem with relocation tables used
# by bootloader. Here we compress using bigger dictionary to gain some space.
lzma e -a1 -d24 pix804.bin.uncompressed-hacked pix804.bin.lzma-hacked

# In this case new image turned out to be 7375727 bytes long so difference is 35425 bytes
# pix804.bin.lzma - pix804.bin.lzma-hacked - pix804.bin.footer = padding size
# (7436288-7375727-25136=60561) and we need to pad that much.
dd if=/dev/zero of=pix804.bin.35425byte-padding bs=35425 count=1

# Since checksums don't match with our new images we need to patch loader to skip them
# just like we did with actual uncompressed firmware above.

# Copy pix804.bin.loader to pix804.bin.loader-hacked
cp pix804.bin.loader pix804.bin.loader-hacked

# Open pix804.bin.loader-hacked in hex editor
# 
# Offset 0x064be (checksum verification on install image failed)
# Old    57 e8 52 1b 00 00 5a 85 c0 89 c3 74 10 6a 34 50
# New    57 eb 03 1b 00 00 5a 85 c0 89 c3 74 10 6a 34 50
#
# Offset 0x122c0
# Old    00 00 10 00 e8 9c 1b 00 00 85 c0 0f 84 5f 02 00
# New    00 00 10 00 eb 03 1b 00 00 85 c0 0f 84 5f 02 00
#
# Offset 0x12370 (checksum verification on uncompressed image failed)
# Old    24 08 e8 ee 1a 00 00 85 c0 0f 84 9b 01 00 00 0f
# New    24 08 eb 03 1a 00 00 85 c0 0f 84 9b 01 00 00 0f
#

# Now we combine hacked files to new image
cat pix804.bin.loader-hacked pix804.bin.lzma-hacked pix804.bin.35425byte-padding \
    pix804.bin.footer > pix804.bin.hacked

# Done. Enjoy your new PIX-OS 8.0(4) image without checks for image validity.

[Kennybug]

impressive

[Fred]

Hopefully Dan shows back up and says thanks to our infamous (and also un-famous) all-time-greatest lurker! :-)

[Dan]

thanks for all the info.

the PIX unit I have has a dead external PSU. Sourcing another when I get time (not a priority at present).

[Dan]

OK so I have decided to build myself a smaller NAS setup. So the above is up for grabs to anyone who is willing to cover the freight costs from me to them! (may include some really small packaging costs depending on how you want it packed).

I got it for nothing so I will not charge any forum members on here anything for it. You pay for freight, it is yours!

[Ned]

So if i understand this correctly, these take SATA drives as well as FC drives?

I'm super sick of losing data and vowed never to do it again! I have a small RAID array in my server that i want to upgrade and have recently moved to 6 2TB SATA drives but wouldn't mind a proper dedicated NAS instead of it sitting in my media server in the lounge (Nice Silverstone LC16 but it's loud)

What would shipping be to little old NZ.

Also; i know i haven't posted much/anything on here but am a long time follower and am friends with old Fred
I also plan to run an injected 7K in my KP Starlet (carbed 7K ATM) and run it on FreeEMS.

So, i understand if others have priority, but if this bad boy will take SATA drives and doesn't cost many hundreds of $$ to ship to Auckland, NZ then i will be super keen!

[insane]

Just ripped a CX320 out this week at my work,

Does it come with the SPs, FC switches with port licenses or are they just the DAEs?

Everyone seems to be related to Fred... I used to work with him when he was in NZ