I needed some lowcost NAS for Oracle especially for a shared storage for RAC. So I was searching for some product which would meet all my requirements such as Gigabit Ethernet, RAID 0 and 1 capability, EXT2, 3 support and of course support for SATA drives. I found Raidon SL3620-2S-LB2 and I bought it because it met all of my needs.

I putted in two SATA 750GB drives and created RAID 1 without problems as Web based console is very intuitive. I setted up the NFS mount for RAC but unfortunatelly I was unable to set specific parameters for RAC such as no_root_squash using Web console. This parameter is needed to allow to change ownership for files and directories (more info). So If you are installing RAC on NFS and you aren't able to create voting files(disks) during CRS installation or you are getting "chown: changing ownership of `...': Operation not permitted" then missing no_root_squash will be probaly the reason. So I checked (using nmap) which ports are open on NAS.


# nmap -nsS 192.168.1.1|egrep 'PORT|open'
PORT     STATE SERVICE
80/tcp   open  http
111/tcp  open  rpcbind
917/tcp  open  unknown
2006/tcp open  invokator
2049/tcp open  nfs

So no Telnet nor SSH service is running on my NAS. So I used one of my utilities to explore all directories and files on web server. Gotcha! I found http://192.168.1.1/cgi/telnet/telnet.cgi which is not able to find in Web Console. This page (script) can be used to enable or disable telnet daemon. Now we check the nmap output again:


# nmap -nsS 192.168.1.1|egrep 'PORT|open'
PORT     STATE SERVICE
23/tcp   open  telnet
80/tcp   open  http
111/tcp  open  rpcbind
917/tcp  open  unknown
2006/tcp open  invokator
2049/tcp open  nfs

Heureka, there is telnet service running. Now I could try to logon using telnet with credentials for "admin".


$ telnet 192.168.1.1
Trying 192.168.1.1...
Connected to 192.168.1.1.
Escape character is '^]'.

mystore login: admin
Password:

BusyBox v1.00-rc3 (2007.05.09-07:20+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

mystore> uname -a
Linux mystore 2.6.15 #136 Wed Jun 27 13:16:02 CST 2007 armv4l unknown

According to banner it is clear that this NAS is running on Linux (2.6.15 kernel) and well known BusyBox project http://www.busybox.net on ARM processor. So I could to use "vi" to modify /etc/exports file to add parameters for NFS export. But first I needed to login as root user which has the same password as admin.


mystore> cat /etc/exports
# /mnt/IDE1 *(rw,no_root_squash,no_all_squash,sync)
/mnt/md1/storage *(rw,no_root_squash)

Due this change I was able to install RAC succesfully. Of course I'm going deeper because I want to install SSH (I hate telnet) and ISCSI target. If my installation will be succesfull then I'll try to compile latest kernel to add OCFS2 and Brtfs (experimental but included since 2.6.28) support (I don't know yet whether it is possible to replace kernel). My next update may come soon...