8. Under the Covers

In order to see what the box was made of, I removed the cover and took a close look. Figure 14 shows the main board of this little device, which is based on the ACARD ATP-865 PCI Ultra ATA133 IDE controller and ALI M5273 USB 2.0 controller.

Figure 14: SimpleShare main-board
(Click image to enlarge)

I suspected this box ran Linux internally, like all of the recent NASes I've looked at. One look at the syslog messages that were being directed to my Linux laptop confirmed my guess, and I also found that the boot messages from the box provided informative details.

The Linux kernel is version 2.4.20 and identifies the processor as a MIPS-based Broadcom BCM4704 running at 266 MHz. There's also 32 meg of RAM in the box and the filesystem is Reiser. I was pleased that the documentation included with the SimpleShare includes an offer to supply the source code for the GPL components used in the box, in accordance with the GPL license.

While I had the box taken apart to photograph the main board, I couldn't resist plugging the hard drive into my desktop Linux system to see what I could see. Unfortunately, I couldn't see much. Attempting to mount the drive resulted in an error, and trying to view the partition table told me that it was missing. There's something nonstandard about the Reiser filesystem setup of this drive, similar to what I found in the Synology DS-101.

But just because we can't mount it, doesn't mean we can't read it! One of the simplest ways to read data from a drive is to just run the Linux command "strings" on the raw device. This will sequentially scan the device, finding and printing null-terminated ASCII Byte strings. Crude, but it told me at least one interesting thing. Along with a lot of standard Linux files and data, a couple of interesting strings popped out: "BroadNAS" and the following string - Broadcom NAS Version 1.1 MBR Tag.

It looked like the box didn't just use a Broadcom chip, but was based on a Broadcom reference design. This press release from Broadcom appears to describe the SimpleShare pretty well and reveals that the Broadcom chipset performs hardware AES encryption and decryption as well as supporting several versions of RAID.

In addition to the strings on the disk, viewing the HTML source to some of the administration web pages shows Broadcom copyrights and scary notices such as "This is UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE of Broadcom Corporation".

I was also curious about the internal firmware on the box, and the CD that came with the SimpleShare conveniently had a firmware image. So I poked around in it, again using my old friend "strings". Along with a lot of standard Linux strings, I found references to a couple of web pages that were not accessible from the administration pages. One was a screen that allowed you to turn NFS on and off (Figure 15), which appeared to work fine.

Figure 15: Hidden NFS screen

Another screen I found was designed to set up wireless capabilities. This screen appeared to be complete, but since this box has no wireless capabilities, it was nonfunctional. Evidently Broadcom intends to market variations of this platform that will support wireless features - perhaps as a combination router / access point / disk server / etc.