Installing Debian Squeeze on Buffalo Linkstation Mini (LS-WSXL)

I own a little pretty Buffalo Linkstation Mini that - I bought it over a year ago and I decided it’s about time to get this puppy for a spin, so to say. Tempted with idea of installing Debian on it I armed myself with a bunch of tutorials and just went for it.

Bricket my NAS twice during this operation. Took about half a day to fully restore it, try again, fail again and finally succeed.

So here are few tips for all of you, so you can learn from my mistakes :P

• buffalo.nas-central.org has a huge amount of information, don’t over look the forum for some more additional solutions

• for the love of god don’t use this instruction if you own a LS-WSXL version of linkstation, instead use this one!

• if you don’t want to cook your own firmware to gain ssh/telnet on newer firmware access you can try:

  java -jar acp_commander.jar -t {NAS_IP} -ip {NAS_IP} -pw password -c "sed -i '/PermitRootLogin/s/no/yes/' /etc/sshd_config"
  java -jar acp_commander.jar -t {NAS_IP} -ip {NAS_IP} -pw password -c "sed -i '/PermitEmptyPasswords/s/^#//' /etc/sshd_config"
  java -jar acp_commander.jar -t {NAS_IP} -ip {NAS_IP} -pw password -c "sed -i '/PermitEmptyPasswords/s/no/yes/' /etc/sshd_config"
  java -jar acp_commander.jar -t {NAS_IP} -ip {NAS_IP} -pw password -c "usermod -p \"\" root"
  java -jar acp_commander.jar -t {NAS_IP} -ip {NAS_IP} -pw password -c "/etc/init.d/sshd.sh restart"

  Worked great for me

• current version of deboostrap is 1.0.42 (get it here)

• if you will encounter problems with volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile in your /etc/apt/sources.list file - just comment it out

• if your NAS won’t boot after first restart - check out this solution

• if you would like to install newer packaged you can try adding: deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian wheezy main to your source list. Installing fresh transmission demon goes then like that (as root): apt-get -t wheezy install transmission-daemon

2012-07-26 - Where to go from there?

After messing for a while with my brand new NAS I’ve successfully updated old packaged using wheezy source lists (almost broke dependencies while doing that), didn’t had much luck compiling kernel tho. I’ve setup account I needed, configured samba shares and installed latest webmin. So far - very happy with old-new Buffalo Mini :-).

2012-07-28 - Some screens

Some screens of my working unit.

Dissambled working unit with two Samsung 640GB drives.

Up-to-date system with webmin installed.