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06 Feb 2023

SSH on the Dumpster Drobo

Sometimes you just need to walk away from a project for a while, and come back to it with a renewed sense of annoyance: “why doesn’t this stupid thing work better?” and “why am I even paying for the electricity to run this piece of junk?”

So it was with me and the Dumpster Drobo (a Drobo b800fs, featured several times previously) this past weekend. I think it might have finally heard the threats I’d been making about finding a dumpster to put it back into, because after logging into the “Drobo Dashboard” management application, I noticed something I’d never paid attention to before:

Listed under “Shares” for my Drobo was a share called ‘DroboApps’!

I’m not sure why I never saw this before, or the option under “Drobo Settings” / “Admin Settings” that apparently makes it visible. I choose to believe that the machine had simply not yet been convinced to give up all its secrets. I could also just have missed it.

Anyway, once I mounted that share, I did some searching online; although there wasn’t much info around about ‘DroboApps’ for the b800fs specifically, there was for the closely-related ‘DroboFS’ on DroboPorts.com, which is a great resource if you find yourself with one of these boxes.

(Apparently, they make pretty good newsreader / NZB downloader boxes. Who knew?)

With the SSH “app”—a self-contained TGZ of Dropbear, I believe—installed, and after a quick reboot, I ran a quick port scan with nmap, and behold:

Nmap scan report for drobo.lan
Host is up (0.0025s latency).
Not shown: 996 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
22/tcp   open  ssh
548/tcp  open  afp
5000/tcp open  upnp
5001/tcp open  commplex-link
MAC Address: 00:1A:XX:XX:XX:XX (Data Robotics, Incorporated)

An open ssh service on port 22!

I’m not entirely sure what the commplex-link business is, up on port 5001 (some Googling only finds other bewildered people asking the same question), but that’s a problem for a different day. Time to log into this thing!

First, I tried logging in as admin, with the same password I use to access Drobo Desktop: no dice. So then I tried that favorite default: admin with password “admin”. No again. Okay, maybe root instead? With no password? No, that’d be too easy. With the Drobo Desktop password? No. Maybe root with password… “root”? That’s just stupid enough to work.

And it did!

It turns out that with a freshly-installed SSH / Dropbear instance, the default account is just root/root. (Guess I’ll have to fix that.)

But finally, after having this thing sitting in my closet since the beginning of The Great Pandemic of 2020, I have a root prompt. Time to see what we’re dealing with inside this mystery box:

# uname -a
Linux Drobo 2.6.22.18 #1 Thu Nov 19 15:41:43 PST 2015 armv5tejl GNU/Linux

Wow, Linux 2.6. That’s rather retro, by 2023 standards. (And if we’re being honest, it was pretty long in the tooth back in late 2015 when this thing was apparently compiled, only a few short months before the 2.6 kernel in general was EOLed, and when most of the world was well into the 4.x series. Ouch.)

But armv5tejl lets us know something about the Drobo’s architecture: it’s based on ARM v5, specifically the v5 “TEJ” instruction set subtype. It was formerly a supported Debian platform, but was dropped in Debian 10. Still, even Debian 9 (aka “Stretch”) would get it up to kernel 4.9. So that’s something to keep in mind…

# ssh -V
OpenSSH_6.8p1, OpenSSL 1.0.2a 19 Mar 2015

Well, that’s not great. Could be worse, I suppose. Let’s see what else this thing is running:

# ps w
PID USER       VSZ STAT COMMAND
root      3032 S    init
[ ...boring stuff skipped... ]
root         0 SW<  [dri_dnas_thread]
root         0 SW<  [mtdblockd]
root         0 SW<  [nftld]
root         0 SWN  [jffs2_gcd_mtd1]
root         0 SWN  [jffs2_gcd_mtd2]
root      1584 S    /sbin/netplugd -P 
root      3036 S    /bin/sh /usr/bin/nasdLogRotate 
root     34228 S    /usr/bin/nasd-fugi 
root      3036 S    -/bin/sh 
root         0 SW<  [dri_shared_res_]
root         0 SW<  [dri_scsi_resp_2]
root         0 SW<  [dri_scsi_req_3]
root         0 SW<  [scsi_eh_0]
root      3032 S    udhcpc -i eth1 -s /etc/udhcpc.sh -b 
root         0 SW<  [kjournald]
root         0 SW<  [kjournald]
root      5544 S    /sbin/nmbd -s /mnt/DroboFS/System/samba/conf/smb.conf 
root     10060 S    /sbin/smbd -s /mnt/DroboFS/System/samba/conf/smb.conf 
root     10060 S    /sbin/smbd -s /mnt/DroboFS/System/samba/conf/smb.conf
root      6264 S    /sbin/afpd -F /mnt/DroboFS/System/netatalk/conf/afpd.conf 
  -P /mnt/DroboFS/System/netatalk/security/afpd.pi

Well, that’s a pretty good view under the hood: pretty standard. smbd for Windows SAMBA file sharing, afpd for traditional Mac sharing, udhcpc as a DHCP daemon; probably the same stuff you’d install if you were setting up a file sharing server on your own hardware. And it lets us know where the config files are for the various services, which is convenient if we want to tweak something (or inadvertently break something).

But what is nftld? mtdblockd? nasd-fugi? New ones to me.

From what I can tell, mtdblockd is a Linux driver that provides a clean block-device API to a number of Flash-based storage devices – presumably rather simple ones that don’t contain logic themselves to present as some other kind of device, like SATA or an SD card. So there must be some of that in there, perhaps for the OS itself.

Unfortunately, nftld is difficult to search for due to the many “NFT” items polluting the Google search results. The only mentions I could find of it, are in conjuncton with ARM-based appliances like the Drobo, so it might be worth looking into as part of the Drobo ‘secret sauce’. Same with nasd-fugi.

But before we go down that road, a tour around the filesystem:

# cd / && ls
bin      dev      etc      lib      linuxrc  mnt      proc     root     sbin
sys      tmp      usr      var
# ls mnt/
DroboFS   DroboFS1  DroboNAS
# ls mnt/Drobo*
mnt/DroboFS:
Shares      System      SystemLogs  home        swapfile
mnt/DroboFS1:
Shares      System      SystemLogs  lost+found
mnt/DroboNAS:
Shares      System      SystemLogs  home        swapfile
# ls -l /mnt/DroboNAS
lrwxrwxrwx    1  root root   7   Nov 19 2015  /mnt/DroboNAS -> DroboFS

That’s a bit interesting. There are two filesystems under /mnt, DroboFS and DroboFS1, and then a symlink called DroboNAS pointing to DroboFS. That might making using rsync to move data to this device a bit more challenging. Wonder what the deal is there…

I’m going to end this here, just in the interest of actually getting what I’ve found posted, and hopefully follow-up with some more useful information as I get a chance to spend more time digging into the device and what can be done with it.

Shhhh—It's Almost Over

Well, 2022 is almost over. Just a few more hours to go, here in the Eastern Time Zone of the USA, and then we can officially move into whatever fresh hell 2023 holds for us.

I’ve never been much of a “New Year’s Resolutions” kind of guy—I feel like setting a bunch of lofty goals for yourself in the depths of the winter, before you’ve even finished digesting all those Christmas cookies, is just setting yourself up for some serious disappointment later, but I don’t mind taking the year’s end as an opportunity to look back on the year we just survived and saying “well, we did it.”

And 2022 was a pretty weird goddamn year.

Let’s be honest, every year since 2016 has felt unpleasantly historic, like someone collectively cursed us to live in “interesting times” forever and ever, or maybe whoever’s running the simulated Universe in which we exist took an extended lunch break and just kinda forgot to come back.

But 2022 seemed… slightly different.

Part of it was probably the feeling—justified or not, and I know a lot of people are drawing breath right now to scream that it is definitely not justified—that COVID-19 was moving from an acute crisis to something more chronic in nature; a “new normal”, you might say, if you wanted to say the sort of things that might get you run over by a diesel pickup truck in large swaths of red-state America.

But I think it’s hard to dispute that if COVID-19 had shown up back in late 2019 or early 2020 with the mortality rate that it has now, with vaccines and antivirals and our more-complete understanding of its nature, we probably never would have treated it as the crisis that it was. Again—rightly or wrongly, as cavalier and cruel as that may make us, which is not really the point—it just wouldn’t have triggered the public’s willingness to take extraordinary measures.

Over the last few years we have essentially determined experimentally just how much death it takes to get Americans—well, most Americans, others not so much—to pull together and take basic public health precautions. In retrospect, the magic number seems to be about 5 and 10 deaths per million population per day, with a strong and ominious upward trend over time. That’s about when the US seemed to take COVID seriously, and below which we seem unwilling to really give a collective shit.

At least we know for next time what it’s going to take.

New Content

I’ve jumped back on the traditional-blog bandwagon, as I’m trying to wean myself off of big-tech social media in general and Twitter specifically.

One of the things I’ve been working on in my newly-freed-up time is migrating lots of notes and other bits of content that I created in my Evernote notebooks, and stick them up here on the blog, in case they might be of interest or use to someone.

So, as a result, you might see new stuff here more often! However, it might also look like crap!

It appears that the flavor of Markdown used by Obsidian, which is what I’m targeting when I export notes from Evernote, is slightly different from the flavor of Markdown used by Jekyll—at least the version I’m currently running. So stuff like tables and code blocks don’t look perfect yet.

But I am working on it, and we’ll see if getting Jekyll to play nice with Obsidian is enough of a pain that it pushes me to move to a different static site generator.

Latest

06 Feb 2023

SSH on the Dumpster Drobo

31 Dec 2022

Shhhh—It's Almost Over

01 Aug 2022

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