disclaimer:

As always we do not warrant this information for any particular use and assume no liability.  We offer it as information that may or may not help you in your quest to solve a problem.  Your mileage may vary. This document describes how to modify security levels of your environment and we cannot stress strongly enough that you must take all necessary precautions to prevent a system compromise.  This is beyond the scope of this article. 

Some tips on maintaining the YelloWMachines NAS.

This is a great NAS that supports both NFS and CIFS and can be used as a firewall, dhcp server, proxy server, firewall, router, etc.  The safest configuration it to use it as a NAS device on your internal network and leave firewall/routing functions up to another dedicated router or firewall/router.

YellowMachines closed their doors abruptly without warning to customers or employees in 2007.  The device was well done and popular enough that several versions of a support site have continued.  As of the writng of this article (June 2009) you can get un-office but excellent support from the Unofficial YellowMachines Support Site.  They have:

• new units (you supply disk drives)
• replacement motherboards
• software updates
• documentation
• help, tips, etc.

In our experience we have found that:

• It runs a DEBIAN version of Linux running on an ARM processor:
  

  •  Linux tekfs01.myhome.com 2.4.25-vrs2-2.93-3 #1 Tue Nov 8 23:02:33 PST 2005 armv4l unknown

• The root login is via telnet and the default password is sos1234
• You can monitor the RAID through the md software and adjust other paramets at the command line that won't be affected or are adjustable via the GUI.
• It does include the GCC compiler so you can add and build software to it.

Adding software

In some cases you may want to add software such as SSHD or XNTPD.  When building them you  you need to:

• create a local non-root user on the box
• create a $HOME/src directory in their $HOME
• use ftp to fetch the appropriate sourcecode
• follow the README information to build

• software such as xntpd requires you to specify the HOST type and so you'll need to specify it as an "arm" processor (e.g., ./configure --host=arm )

• you may have to re-arrance the order in which some header files are included etc., to compensate for redefinitions.

Adding software

 If you want to know how it's doing you probably configured it through the GUI to send emal alerts.  But quickly you realize those "postfix" messages from logcheck get old every hour.  You can change the frequency with which the logcheck is run and thence how often you get notified with a summary.  Here's how:

1. log in as root (telnet to the box)
2. change to the directory from where cron finds and runds the logcheck job:  cd /etc/cron.d
3. make a backup of the file into your home directory:  cp logcheck $HOME/logcheck.$$
4. edit the logcheck file and change the cron entry as needed:

   1. hourly (2 minutes after the hour):  2 * * * *       root    test -x /usr/sbin/logcheck && nice -n10 /usr/sbin/logcheck

   2. daily (30 minutes after midnight)    30 0 * * *       root    test -x /usr/sbin/logcheck && nice -n10 /usr/sbin/logcheck

   3. weekly (Sunday at 0600):  0 6 * * 0       root    test -x /usr/sbin/logcheck && nice -n10 /usr/sbin/logcheck

Good luck!

Engineering