Hi everyone! 
Just wanted to drop in and post a quick thanks to the board for all of the useful information about configuring and working with Snap servers. I have a Snap 1000 that someone gave to me at a computer enthusiasts meeting a while back which I only recently got around to having a play with.
Using the info in the
Hack a Snap Server 1000 thread, I was able to reset/reconfigure the device with the minimum of hassle and start using it straight away, and the detailed info about firmware storage/management allowed me to work out a simple five minute technique (If anyone's interested, please ask and I'll post it.
) for swapping and/or upgrading the Snaps' HDD at will.
Anyhow, I do have a few further questions that I'd like to ask whilst I'm here.
As stated above, I believe my Snap is a
1000v2 as it doesn't bring up the NIC or web interface if no HDD is present. I however don't know its
exact specs regarding CPU architecture, RAM, and other on-board components.
- I've just downloaded the SnapOS v4.0.860 installation package linked from This thread mainly because I'd like to have support for 48-bit LBA and drives over 128/137GB in the future. Before I try installing this on my one Snap however, Is this firmware version known to be fully compatible with the Snap 1000v2?
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- My understanding is that the Snap 1000v2 and later servers store all of their firmware on the HDD rather than an on-board flash ROM, and I've already managed to take a backup/restoration image by dumping the first 128MB of the disk that my Snap came with, which I keep saved on my bootable Ubuntu drive. Presumably, this means that - If I uploaded a bad firmware image to the Snap/ran into problems during the upgrade process - I could undo that by simply dumping my recovery image back to the disk in question and doing a /reinit as one would with a new disk. Is that correct?
.
- I see that my Snap has two IDE headers on the motherboard, one of which is a known IDE bus (What would I hook the disk up to otherwise?
) and the other I presume is a service port of some kind. I did read that it might be possible to coax the Snap into mounting two disks on the IDE bus with a firmware hack, but I don't want to risk bricking my Snap if I can help it. - Is it possible to get two disks working from that one IDE header?
- Could a "Bricked" Snap be returned to life by re-dumping the firmware as in point 2 above?
- Is there any information as to what that second IDE/service header can be used for?
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- I'm more than happy to put my recovery image and dumping instructions online (If useful) so that other people can initialise new disks for use in their Snaps, which will be especially useful for those who've got hold of a Snap without a hard drive. However, I get the impression that Snap Appliance/Overland/Adaptec (Delete as appropriate) aren't too happy about people sharing any form of firmware image due to copyright concerns.
Given that they've released SnapOS 4.0.860 as a freely available closed binary and my recovery image has a firmware somewhere in the 3.0.xxx generation, does anyone think the copyright holders would consider such sharing acceptable, given it would be intended for those who want to get their older Snaps up and running? Would there even be a need for this, or is no-one already sharing a recovery image? (I havn't checked as I've been using my own)
.
- I couldn't find or work out what format the Snap uses for it's disks, although I did see Unix XFS mentioned somewhere along the line...Whatever it is, neither Ubuntu 10.04 LTS nor BackTrack 4.0F seem to recognise it out of the box. With a view to data recovery if ever it's needed; Does anyone know if the Snap encrypts files in any way, or could they be pulled straight off the disk using Foremost or a similar surface scanning tool?
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- Finally (Phew! ) I tried copying about 10GB of data to my Snap the other day across my 100mbps wired network, but the whole process was extremely slow and took a good 3.5 hours. I presume from this that the Snap 1000 only has a 10mbps NIC built in...But is that actually the case, or might I have a network problem and have made an incorrect assumption about the Snaps NIC?
Farewell for now, many thanks again for all of the info, and apologies for the textwall...As you can probably tell, I'm a bit of a compulsive writer!
+++ DieselDragon +++