Saturday, February 7, 2009

The Buffalo Linkstation Live (v2) - Unbricking

I just managed to get my Buffalo Linkstation (running Debian based Freelink) to brick in a new way: it would pull the kernel and initrd by tftp over and over again or it would appear to have loaded them but simply stop.

After trawling the forums I have salvaged the situation by mounting the HDD on a linux system and erasing and rebuilding the default /dev/sda1 partition.

I have also recorded how to do it in the relevant wiki article like a good boy:

http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Revive_your_arm9_box_from_scratch#Troubleshooting

Linkstations and similar Linux based NAS devices make fantastic home servers - mine draws ~13W under load providing daap, DHCP, NTP, apache, NFS, samba and AFS. Beats the hell out of an always on home Intel server.

Laird Tpcm 7250 is as good as Honeywell PTM7950 as thermal paste / interface for PC

[This is not very scientific, however it is notable. At 7.5W/m-K vs the installed SYY-157 at 15.7 W/m-K it performed better in real world lo...