Flashing your NSA310 with Debian Squeeze to run Sabnzbd, Sickbeard & CouchPotato - Part 1

I bought this NAS for only £30 and although very good value was not impressed with the Zyxel branding and processes needlessly running on my little box, plus the fact that I had trouble with FFP and couldn't get a lot of apps and their dependencies running easily so I decided to be a little more creative and use the hardware I had just bought to run exactly what I wanted and only what I wanted.... so here is the "how to" on running a virgin Debian squeeze install on your NSA310 along with Sab,SB and CP, enjoy ;)


I am a windows man and this was my first real experience with linux so this guide is going to be very simple so that I or anyone else can follow along without too much knowledge of whats going on (but hopefully you will understand packages, repos and a few other bits by the time this multi-part blog is over) anyway here without further ado is part 1...

Part 1 - Creating a USB to TTL converter

You will need:
* An old Nokia cable, model DKU-5 (eBay is your friend here)
* A soldering iron (and basic soldering skills)
* Solder
* Electrical Tape
* A multimeter
* A screwdriver (Flat & Philips)

The first thing you need to do is cut the end off your cable (Not the USB end!!), this should expose a total of 5 wires, which you will need to strip the ends off.

Next use your multimeter to test the voltages and discover the GND (Ground/negative), TX(send) and RX (Recieve)

The values:
GND - no reading and should always be the black wire
TX - 2.22v (dc)
RX - 3.11v (dc)

With any luck you could buy the exact same clone cable from eBay that I did and the wires may end up being the same colours ;)

Then connect them to your Serial header as shown in the 2 pictures below:

The whole board showing the location of the serial header

Close up showing wires, complete with labels

DONT FORGET! make sure you cover the board around the pins in electrical insulation tape, you don't want a wire to accidentally touch the motherboard and short something out.

Now when you connect the cable to your machine you will see it shows up as a COM port in device manager, right click on it, choose properties and set as follows:

Next you need to fire up putty (download below)

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

and open your serial connection with following settings:

Then power on your NAS with your serial cable attached and with any luck you should see something similar to this (If you don't try swapping TX & RX)

This is uBoot, as you can see it says hit any key to stop autoboot, if you miss it then the zyxel image will load from NAND and you must reboot the NAS, but if you stop the boot process you now have control of the little box you see before you!!!

Part 2 will demonstrate how to load a linux image from USB and begin the installation.

Part 2