Jul 092015
 

So after poking around with the bootloader, I decided to go look for the stock firmware to see if I could upload that with some modifications so I could play around with the stock system.

After a night of Googling, I couldn’t find any links to the original firmware. I tried to discover if I could download the firmware from the NAS, but that didn’t get me anywhere either. All the Googling did point me in the direction of SnakeOS however, which is replacement firmware for some NASes. However, it hadn’t been maintained in quite a few years so I was initially a bit hesitant.

Instead, I looked into installing Debian onto the NAS, but according to the documentation Debian ARMEL needs an ARMv4t processor, and the NAS only has an ARMv4 processor, so it looks like I’m out of luck there.

After Debian, it looked like my options were either SnakeOS, or custom build a Linux distro to put onto the NAS.

I decided to go with the SnakeOS option, as it was the more time efficient option. Installing SnakeOS was a simple matter of downloading the “from-original” firmware file from the project page, and installing it using the built in Firmware Updater on the NAS. The update took a fair few minutes, so let it sit for a while when you update it.

After updating it, the NAS booted up with a new MAC address, so I had to update my DHCP leases with the new MAC address to make sure it kept the same IP address.

Logging into the Web UI is done in the same manner, except the default password is now snake.

Snake OS WebUI

Snake OS WebUI

Once you’ve logged in, you can then configure the NAS to your liking.
SnakeOS has a built in SSH server, so I no longer need to use the serial console to access the NAS.

Much simpler than trying to hack it manually, but also a lot less fun 🙁

Now that I have root access to the NAS, I may try to add functionality onto it as I need it. Stay tuned for more!

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  4 Responses to “Cheap and Nasty: Hacking the $5 Ritmo CE-3590 NAS Part 2”

  1. I also picked up one of these and I’ve finally got around to playing with it. Thanks for the info on SnakeOS! Did you end up doing much with it?

    I put a 2TB Seagate in mine and the first thing I discovered is 32MB of RAM isn’t enough to format it to ext3 😛 I was able to log in over SSH and set up a swap partition though 🙂

  2. Hi ,

    Do you happen to have the original stock-firmware backup? (2.5.0-May 21 2009)

    I am thinking to upgrade to Snake OS in the hope that it supports unicode (different languages) for Sambl service.

    But it would be a bumper if the SnakeOS (1.3.2) I downloaded not supporting the features I want, and their wiki seems down too

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