{"id":288,"date":"2014-01-20T12:54:22","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T20:54:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jacksontech.net\/?p=288"},"modified":"2016-02-28T20:48:50","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T04:48:50","slug":"acer-h340-nas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/2014\/01\/acer-h340-nas\/","title":{"rendered":"Acer H340 NAS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Edit 12\/15\/2014: Ooops: the Atom Z230 is a hyper-threading single-core CPU, not a dual-core. I noticed this a few months ago but haven&#8217;t gotten around to updating this post until now.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Several months ago, a friend gave me an Acer Aspire easyStore H340 NAS. The system hard drive had failed and up until recently I haven&#8217;t had any spare SATA drives, so it collected dust on top of my desktop computer until I could find a drive for it.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_292\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"width: 296px\"><a href=\"http:\/\/jacksontech.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/h340.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-292\" src=\"http:\/\/jacksontech.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/h340-296x300.jpg\" alt=\"Resistance is Futile\" width=\"296\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/h340-296x300.jpg 296w, https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/h340.jpg 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 296px) 100vw, 296px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Resistance is Futile<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The stock H340 has the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>1.6GHz Intel Atom 64-bit dual-core CPU<\/li>\n<li>2GB DDR2 RAM<\/li>\n<li>4x SATA 2.0 hard drive bays<\/li>\n<li>1TB Western Digital Caviar Green hard drive<\/li>\n<li>1x Gigabit Ethernet port (Marvell chipset)<\/li>\n<li>5 USB 2.0 ports<\/li>\n<li>1 eSata port<\/li>\n<li>1 PCI-E 1x connector (not used).<\/li>\n<li>Windows Home Server<\/li>\n<li>Onboard 256M flash device containing restore image for the OS (although it seems to need a driver\/application DVD as well).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All in all, a capable little device, especially for the low, low price of free. It sits in a case approximately 10&#8243; square. Air is drawn in from the left side, across the hard drive bays and over the motherboard at the bottom of the case, and exhausted out the right side by a 120mm fan. Notably, there is no video connector&#8211;which makes sense, considering it&#8217;s marketed as a headless NAS. Still, this is limiting, although there are several companies who make VGA\/PS2 dongles that connect to a proprietary connector, and the PCI-E slot could be used for a PCI-E 1x video card.<\/p>\n<p>Lacking the WHS restore disk, I decided to put Ubuntu Server on the H340. First, I did a little research to find out if this device will boot from a USB flash drive. It will, but not by default; the jumper JP3 on the motherboard puts the NAS into &#8220;debug&#8221; mode, which allows you to change the boot order in the BIOS&#8211;except I couldn&#8217;t see the BIOS, because there&#8217;s no video card connector. Ooops. So I went with the considerably less exciting route and installed Ubuntu Server on another computer, then transferred the hard drive to the NAS.<\/p>\n<p>With JP3 jumpered (in debug mode), the device seemed to ignore the hard drive and booted into some sort of rescue\/recovering environment with a hostname containing &#8220;minint&#8221;. I suspect this is what is contained on the onboard 256M flash device. Once I removed the jumper on JP3, restoring the NAS to stock configuration, it booted right up. I installed Samba and several minutes later had a simple file server set up and running.<\/p>\n<p>Some thoughts:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>If you set up Ubuntu Server on a second computer, you&#8217;ll want to remove the entry in \/etc\/udev\/rules.d\/70-persistent-net.rules such that the NIC in the NAS (there&#8217;s some alliteration for you) will be detected as eth0 and not, say, eth1. You&#8217;ll also want to have OpenSSH set up so you can SSH into it after installing the hard drive.<\/li>\n<li>You&#8217;ll probably want to install lm-sensors and smartmontools to keep an eye on temperature and hard drive health. I also installed logwatch and configured it to email my LAN&#8217;s mailserver.<\/li>\n<li>The power supply fan (a tiny 40mm fan on the back of the proprietary power supply) is noisy. I suspect this is specific to my used H340 and not common to all H340s.<\/li>\n<li>The side fan is reasonably quiet. However, once it boots, the motherboard throttles the fan down to 700RPM. CPU temperature idles around 63-65C in this configuration. The fan speed can be adjusted either manually or via a script (such as fancontrol). I have mine set to about 1100RPM, which lowers CPU temperature by 4-6C while keeping the room quiet enough for me to sleep at night. It also helps cool the hard drive(s)&#8211;and cooler hard drives tend to be less troublesome.<\/li>\n<li>The hard drive LEDs and the &#8220;i&#8221; front panel LED need a driver to control them. Fortunately, someone has written one called <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/merelin\/mediasmartserverd\" target=\"_blank\">mediasmartserverd<\/a>. Among other things, it enables the drive lights and allows you to control the brightness of all the LEDs&#8211;useful for sleeping in a dark room. It also allows you to control the &#8220;i&#8221; LED and use it as an indicator when operating system updates are available. (This feature may be Ubuntu\/Debian specific.) The color scheme is as follows: <strong>blue<\/strong> == updates available, <strong>purple<\/strong> == <em>security<\/em> updates available, <strong>red <\/strong>== reboot needed (after updates are applied). Note that it is godawful hard to differentiate between purple and red when the brightness is turned down low; the purple looks very much like red.<\/li>\n<li>The H340 is adorable. I like the form factor.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>To control the fan and start mediasmartserverd, I put the following in my \/etc\/rc.local, just above the &#8220;exit 0&#8221; line:<\/p>\n<pre># warning: I don't really know what this is doing\r\n# put the fan into user-controlled mode (?) default is \"2\"\r\necho 1 &gt; \/sys\/devices\/platform\/dme1737.2160\/pwm1_enable\r\n\r\n# allow root to adjust the fan speed\r\nchmod u+w \/sys\/devices\/platform\/dme1737.2160\/pwm1\r\n\r\n# echo a value between ~100 and 255 here. \r\n# corresponds (somewhat) to fan speed\r\n# If it's too low, your drives\/CPU may fry!\r\necho 130 &gt; \/sys\/devices\/platform\/dme1737.2160\/pwm1\r\n\r\n# start mediaserverd, adjusting LED brightness and update checks\r\n\/usr\/local\/bin\/mediasmartserverd --brightness 3 --update-monitor -D<\/pre>\n<p>Remember, overriding the motherboard&#8217;s fan control is risky. I&#8217;m making it run faster than it does by default, but a typo could cause it to run slower or not run at all. Be careful. You don&#8217;t want to fry your hard drives!<\/p>\n<p>All in all, I&#8217;m pleased with this little device. It&#8217;s not the fastest server in the world, but it&#8217;ll get the job done, and for me, that&#8217;s all that matters.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also cute. Just pointing that out&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Edit 12\/15\/2014: Ooops: the Atom Z230 is a hyper-threading single-core CPU, not a dual-core. I noticed this a few months ago but haven&#8217;t gotten around to updating this post until now. Several months ago, a friend gave me an Acer Aspire easyStore H340 NAS. The system hard drive had failed and up until recently I &#8230; <a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/2014\/01\/acer-h340-nas\/\">more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,3],"tags":[18,19,20,17,21,22],"class_list":["post-288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comptech","category-linux","category-networking","tag-acer","tag-h340","tag-linux-2","tag-nas","tag-ubuntu","tag-ubuntu-server"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":293,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions\/293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}