Netgear Stora 3TB or 4TB drives

I am reapeating this post from the Netgear Stora forums as a backup, the post is copied from http://forum1.netgear.com/showthread.php?t=72007&page=3 anf here it is:

Since i'm not getting posts from the forum and netgear isn't going to upgrade to support 3tb drives, i'm just going to post it here:

First, you need SSH access to your stora:

SSH Access to a Stora

First you need to get your Stora’s product key, it’s located behind the Stora, close to the ethernet port or may be on the bottom of the device, it’s in the form “XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX”.

Then you just need to SSH to your Stora with a particular user which is just one of the users created through the web interface (the user needs to have the administrator flag selected) concatenated by the string “_hipserv2_netgear_XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX” (where XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX is your product key, ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!), this time you’ll get a password prompt instead of the “connection to x:22 exited: remote closed the connection”, just enter the user password, which is the one you use to access your Stora through the web interface and you’ll get user access. Now to get root access you just need to write “sudo -s” and enter again the user password, every ADMINISTRATOR user is allowed to use the sudo command. You’ll probably get a: “audit_log_user_command(): Connection refused” but it doesn’t matter, you’ll get the root prompt!

Example: if you created a user named “stora”, flagging the “user is administrator” during the Stora setup or through the web interface and your Stora’s product key is “1234-5678-9999-9999? you just need to ssh to your Stora and use “stora_hipserv2_netgear_1234-5678-9999-9999? as user, either using Putty or your favorite SSH client and enter that user’s password, then “sudo -E -s” and you’ll get root access, that’s it!

There’s another way to login concatenating the username with the string “_axsync_” but it allows you to issue only “mkdir” and “rsync” commands.

Explanation:

Basically Netgear, or more probably Axentra, ships his software with a modified version of SSHD that disallows regular user access, except for “root” and “apache” users, what it does is basically changing the logging username by substituting the first character with a “0? so it doesn’t match with the list of allowed users inside the /etc/passwd.

The SSH Deamon leaves a “backdoor” open, which basically is: if your username is appended with the above string, this substitution doesn’t take place, and you can login normally.

p.s. the “hipserv2_netgear” part may be different for some users, although I suppose is the same for everybody, if you already hacked your Stora using other ways I’d ask you to check the “/etc/oe-release” and post here the DistName line and we’ll try to figure it out.

Now to setup your stora to support 3tb drives:

Requirements:

- Any SSH client
- Two 3TB or bigger drives
- Any USB stick inserted in the front of the stora

Log into your device via SSH

Copy every line step by step:

---Get root

sudo -E -s

---Navigate to sbin directory

cd /sbin

---Partition the first drive with GNU parted (to make a GPT file format so that 3TB+ drives work)

./parted /dev/sda
mklabel gpt
yes
[Press Enter]
unit TB
mkpart primary 0.00TB 3.00TB (4.00TB for 4tb but I haven't tried it).
print
quit

---Partition the second drive with GNU parted

./parted /dev/sdb
mklabel gpt
yes
[Press Enter]
unit TB
mkpart primary 0.00TB 3.00TB
print
quit

---Make the raid0 array with a blocksize of 128 (the blocksize is defaulted to 64, but 128 might be more desireable)

./mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=0 --chunk=128 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

y

or

---Make the raid1 array

./mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --chunk=128 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

y

--- Wait for sync (also shows in web interface)

watch cat /proc/mdstat

*** Takes Long Time *** Mine took 4 1/2 hours.

---Make the USB Stick a swap partition and mount it as swap drive

./mkswap /dev/sdc
./swapon /dev/sdc

---Then we partition the drives to XFS filesystem

./mkfs.xfs /dev/md0

---Then we are going to text edit the fstab system (this system mounts the drive at startup)

vi /etc/fstab

Remove the # in front of

/dev/md0 /home xfs defaults,bsdgroups,noatime,nodiratime 0 0

Then as a finishing very important touch we make sure that the raid0 array is remembered at startup

./mdadm -Q --detail --brief /dev/md0 > /etc/mdadm.conf

Then reboot the device

./reboot

Wait a few minutes, you should see the device boot. The HDD leds will go from green to orange for a few seconds, don't worry they will become green again and you should hear the HDD's working. This is probably the stora finalizing the partition so that it's ready for use.