Hi everybody,
Intenso Gmbh distributes a line of external USB 3.0 hard-disk enclosures (official product page: http://www.intenso.de/produkte_en.php?k … 383118261) which furthermore work in standalone mode as an embedded, battery powered Linux system, apparently assembled from Ralink 4.0.1.0 SDK. This is a slightly customized BuildRoot distribution, including kernel 2.6.21, Busybox, minidlna, smbd and lighthttpd servers, and booting through the U-Boot bootloader.
There is a backdoor in the latest stock firmware ver. 1.1, allowing connections from the same subnet via telnet, with username "root" and password "20080826". It is relatively easy also to unpack it, patch such 'feature', and reflash the unit via its HTTP interface.
The hardware seems based on the RT5350 MIPS 24Kec CPU variant (i.e. without a real FPU?), it includes 32 MiB of RAM and 8 MiB of flash memory. Since hard-disk space poses no limits, I've managed to install and run a complete Debian 5.0 aka "Lenny" distro for MIPSEL architecture in a chroot mountpoint, without having to upgrade the stock kernel.
I would like however to undertake such step too, and switch to a properly maintained, more recent environment. This combination of portable SAN / router / UPS and plenty of storage in a small form factor has plenty of appeal, and I've started to document my own poking around with it. It seems everything should basically be already supported by OpenWRT. Anybody else interested?
Have lots of fun,
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mrmo