Medion 1TB NAS Server (P89625)
I don’t really know why I bought this, because in the long run the Bauhn tablet we bought from ALDI is essentially a piece of shit. The wireless router I bought to use as an AP is also a piece of shit. I figured it out with both units too late to take advantage of their no questions asked return policy, so I won’t make the same mistake with this thing.
After I connected it up, it grabbed an IP address off the DHCP server - relatively straightforward. Determining this IP address on a Windows machine is made even easier, as the relevant media servers popped up in the “Network folder” almost immediately. Actually configuring the thing, well that’s a different story.
It comes with an installation software disc, but I usually hate these things. The software is almost always bad, and it should have a web configurator, right? Went looking for it and sure enough, it’s there on port 80. However after clicking around a few options, the thing hangs… until I reboot it. The first time it doesn’t even answer pings, the second time it answers pings but I can’t get it to do anything else useful. So I’ll try the software.
After installing the software, doing anything more than connecting a network drive essentially sends you straight back to the web interface. Awesome. At least it seems to support syslog - I might set that up to try figure out what’s going on with the thing.
No telnet/SSH access, but that’s easily rectified. Per an article about putting Gentoo on a similar device, simply navigate to http://nas-server/r36258,/adv,/cgi-bin/remote_help-cgi?type=backdoor, and then you can telnet to it. Log in with user “root” and your administration password and you have root access. Now what to do with it.
The built-in torrent downloader doesn’t support magnet links, which makes it effectively useless these days - but with root I’m wondering if I can install transmission? Will have to investigate further.
Update: After about 30 minutes, it stopped crashing. I suspect, as do others on IRC, that it’s something XFS related with the brand new volumes configured out of the box. It’s been functioning fine the rest of the day (it’s almost midnight now) and I can get almost 12MB read and write speeds, which is basically wired speed on the 100mbps ethernet.
Update #2: The unit has now failed completely. I never actually put any important data on it, thankfully, but it was well passed the Aldi no-questions-asked-return period and the thing stopped responding completely. I tried multiple attempts at getting it to factory reset, and it simply won’t rejoin the network.
At some point I’ll try break into it and see if I can solder a serial console in and resuscitate it, but at this point I’m left wondering if anyone can give me an excuse to ever buy anything made by Medion ever again.
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