ZyXEL NSA325 v2 NAS and LMS

[jazzguy]

I am thinking of buying the ZyXEL NSA325 v2 NAS. One of my primary requirements is to use it to run the Squeezebox server. I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who has tried this. Comments on smoothness of operation; ease of installing Squeezebox server (and version used) would be particulalry appreciated. Many thanks.

[Stratmangler]

Been running a NSA310 for a good few years now, and it hasn't missed a beat!

I suspect that all the Zyxel NAS drives will be on the same level of LMS as mine (why would Zyxel create work for themselves?) so it will be 7.7.1, and yes it is easy to get working, as it's supported from the Zyxel website.
The "heavy lifting" aspects of LMS do not work, so no transcoding or resampling on the fly. Alac files do not play, nor do Ape, Musepack or Wavpack.

Server administration is best performed from a web browser, not the admin app.

[jazzguy]

Been running a NSA310 for a good few years now, and it hasn't missed a beat!

I suspect that all the Zyxel NAS drives will be on the same level of LMS as mine (why would Zyxel create work for themselves?) so it will be 7.7.1, and yes it is easy to get working, as it's supported from the Zyxel website.
The "heavy lifting" aspects of LMS do not work, so no transcoding or resampling on the fly. Alac files do not play, nor do Ape, Musepack or Wavpack.

Server administration is best performed from a web browser, not the admin app.

Many thanks. That's helpful.

[utgg]

I've very recently obtained a NSA325 v2, mainly for running LMS. I'm very pleased with it. Mine is fitted with a single WD RED 2GB disk.

Pluses:
- Good spec for an ARM NAS: 1.6GHz processor and 512M ram, making it very good value for money.
- Very low power for a server left on 24/7. Only 10W (measured) while playing music, and 6.5W after the disk spins down when there is nothing playing.
- Neat single box solution - no mess of cables and multiple boxes and power supplies. The variable speed fan is pretty quiet too.
- Nice for Linux DIY, using an FFP USB stick.

Minuses:
- Official ZyXEL LMS package is a little dated at 7.7.1, and has transcoding disabled. It works fine, but will probably never be updated.

A little background on the LMS support: I wanted something I could support in the long term by myself, without relying on official LMS support from the NAS vendor or relying on others in the community to maintain a 3rd party package such SSODS. So I've done the DIY thing to get 7.8.1 and 7.9 running on the NSA325 v2.

I've used an FFP USB stick (zyxel.nas-central.org/wiki/FFP-stick) to build CPAN libraries for LMS that are compatible with the Linux kernel that runs on the NAS. LMS 7.9.1 nightlies are running fine. This process is quite straightforward, if you aren't afraid of the linux command line.

One of the nice things about using FFP is that there is no meddling with the ZyXEL firmware or installing anything on the disks - you can simply remove the USB stick and the NAS is back to stock. I've got LMS installed entirely on the USB stick - it could be cloned and plugged into any NSA325 and just work...

I rate the performance of this NAS as excellent. While playing flacs the processor is idling at 1% load with LMS using only 15% of the memory. Transcoding is also absolutely fine - playing iTunes aac files on a duet receiver the processor load is around 20%, and the NAS will handle simultaneous transcoding of 4 different aac streams to 4 different players without missing a beat.

A full scan of my 10000 flac track library takes about 10 minutes. For comparison, the same scan on a 6 year old but decent spec win7 desktop PC takes about 5 minutes with the library on its local disk, or 14 minutes with the music on the NSA325 connected by Gigabit ethernet (and it is a fast NAS - 50MB/s). I imagine that those with 100K+ track libraries would find this NAS a bit slow for scanning compared to an X86 PC/server, but for my size of library it is absolutely fine. Ignore the naysayers that say an ARM based NAS isn't up to the job!

[jazzguy]

I've very recently obtained a NSA325 v2, mainly for running LMS. I'm very pleased with it. Mine is fitted with a single WD RED 2GB disk.

Pluses:
- Good spec for an ARM NAS: 1.6GHz processor and 512M ram, making it very good value for money.
- Very low power for a server left on 24/7. Only 10W (measured) while playing music, and 6.5W after the disk spins down when there is nothing playing.
- Neat single box solution - no mess of cables and multiple boxes and power supplies. The variable speed fan is pretty quiet too.
- Nice for Linux DIY, using an FFP USB stick.

Minuses:
- Official ZyXEL LMS package is a little dated at 7.7.1, and has transcoding disabled. It works fine, but will probably never be updated.

A little background on the LMS support: I wanted something I could support in the long term by myself, without relying on official LMS support from the NAS vendor or relying on others in the community to maintain a 3rd party package such SSODS. So I've done the DIY thing to get 7.8.1 and 7.9 running on the NSA325 v2.

I've used an FFP USB stick (zyxel.nas-central.org/wiki/FFP-stick) to build CPAN libraries for LMS that are compatible with the Linux kernel that runs on the NAS. LMS 7.9.1 nightlies are running fine. This process is quite straightforward, if you aren't afraid of the linux command line.

One of the nice things about using FFP is that there is no meddling with the ZyXEL firmware or installing anything on the disks - you can simply remove the USB stick and the NAS is back to stock. I've got LMS installed entirely on the USB stick - it could be cloned and plugged into any NSA325 and just work...

I rate the performance of this NAS as excellent. While playing flacs the processor is idling at 1% load with LMS using only 15% of the memory. Transcoding is also absolutely fine - playing iTunes aac files on a duet receiver the processor load is around 20%, and the NAS will handle simultaneous transcoding of 4 different aac streams to 4 different players without missing a beat.

A full scan of my 10000 flac track library takes about 10 minutes. For comparison, the same scan on a 6 year old but decent spec win7 desktop PC takes about 5 minutes with the library on its local disk, or 14 minutes with the music on the NSA325 connected by Gigabit ethernet (and it is a fast NAS - 50MB/s). I imagine that those with 100K+ track libraries would find this NAS a bit slow for scanning compared to an X86 PC/server, but for my size of library it is absolutely fine. Ignore the naysayers that say an ARM based NAS isn't up to the job!

Thank you for the additional, positive, information. I do not have your computing skills but you do confirm that the NAS is up to the job of running LMS.

[stoobie-doo]

I've very recently obtained a NSA325 v2, mainly for running LMS. I'm very pleased with it. Mine is fitted with a single WD RED 2GB disk.

Pluses:
- Good spec for an ARM NAS: 1.6GHz processor and 512M ram, making it very good value for money.
- Very low power for a server left on 24/7. Only 10W (measured) while playing music, and 6.5W after the disk spins down when there is nothing playing.
- Neat single box solution - no mess of cables and multiple boxes and power supplies. The variable speed fan is pretty quiet too.
- Nice for Linux DIY, using an FFP USB stick.

Minuses:
- Official ZyXEL LMS package is a little dated at 7.7.1, and has transcoding disabled. It works fine, but will probably never be updated.

A little background on the LMS support: I wanted something I could support in the long term by myself, without relying on official LMS support from the NAS vendor or relying on others in the community to maintain a 3rd party package such SSODS. So I've done the DIY thing to get 7.8.1 and 7.9 running on the NSA325 v2.

I've used an FFP USB stick (zyxel.nas-central.org/wiki/FFP-stick) to build CPAN libraries for LMS that are compatible with the Linux kernel that runs on the NAS. LMS 7.9.1 nightlies are running fine. This process is quite straightforward, if you aren't afraid of the linux command line.

One of the nice things about using FFP is that there is no meddling with the ZyXEL firmware or installing anything on the disks - you can simply remove the USB stick and the NAS is back to stock. I've got LMS installed entirely on the USB stick - it could be cloned and plugged into any NSA325 and just work...

I rate the performance of this NAS as excellent. While playing flacs the processor is idling at 1% load with LMS using only 15% of the memory. Transcoding is also absolutely fine - playing iTunes aac files on a duet receiver the processor load is around 20%, and the NAS will handle simultaneous transcoding of 4 different aac streams to 4 different players without missing a beat.

A full scan of my 10000 flac track library takes about 10 minutes. For comparison, the same scan on a 6 year old but decent spec win7 desktop PC takes about 5 minutes with the library on its local disk, or 14 minutes with the music on the NSA325 connected by Gigabit ethernet (and it is a fast NAS - 50MB/s). I imagine that those with 100K+ track libraries would find this NAS a bit slow for scanning compared to an X86 PC/server, but for my size of library it is absolutely fine. Ignore the naysayers that say an ARM based NAS isn't up to the job!

I recently bought and setup a 320 and have installed the official 7.7.1 onto it. Can you point me to a guide that would walk me through how you installed the updated version of LMS onto it?

[utgg]

I wrote some notes a while back to remind myself what I did to install LMS 7.9 on the NSA325 - I've distilled them here.
[Edit: Instructions and attachments updated on 13 Feb 2017]

First of all you need to set up an FFP stick. Start with a FAT32 formatted USB stick of 4GB or more. I've used a SanDisk-Ultra-Speed-Flash-SDCZ43-016G-G46, which is fast and very tiny. I'll repeat the pertinent parts of instructions from here: http://zyxel.nas-central.org/wiki/FFP-stick.

Download FFPStick-2013-11-24.zip from http://downloads.zyxel.nas-central.o...elf/FFP-Stick/. If you are adventurous there is a more up-to-date version to try in the beta directory there. Extract the contents of the zip file onto the USB stick, and rename nsa310_check_file_C0.libzy.so to nsa310_check_file_C0, replacing the original nsa310_check_file_C0. Then plug the stick into one of the ports on the NSA (not the front USB3 port on the NSA325, that doesn't work), make sure telnet is disabled in the ZyXel web config (you don't want two telnet daemons), and reboot the NSA box.

This will repartion the USB stick to add an ext3 partition, download the ffp stuff onto it and reboot with ffp up and running with a telnet daemon active. It takes a few minutes. You should then be able to telnet in (using putty or similar). Note that the two USB stick partitions will have become visible via the NAS network file access - if you are having problems getting telnet have a look at the log file on the FAT partition to see if anything went wrong. Once you are in via telnet, the first step is to enable ssh and disable telnet (which is pretty insecure):

chmod a+x /ffp/start/sshd.sh
/ffp/start/sshd.sh start

Check you can ssh login as root (from putty or similar, using normal admin password), then from the ssh login deactivate the telnet daemon:

/ffp/start/telnetd.sh stop
chmod a-x /ffp/start/telnetd.sh

Use slacker to get the following additional packages. First update package lists:

slacker -U

then:

slacker -i

Select the following packages (click with mouse) and click <ok>:

mz:3rd-party/SnakeByte/autoconf-2.68-arm-01.txz
mz:3rd-party/SnakeByte/automake-1.11.4-arm-01.txz
mz:3rd-party/SnakeByte/lame-3.99.5-arm-01.txz
mz:3rd-party/SnakeByte/yasm-1.2.0-arm-01.txz
mz:kernel_headers-2.6.31.8-arm-1.txz
mz:libgd-20130314-arm-1.txz
s:binutils-2.22-arm-1.txz
s:cmake-2.8.4-arm-1.txz
s:diffutils-3.2-arm-1.txz
s:gcc-4.5_20111110-arm-1.txz
s:git-1.7.8.4-arm-1.txz
s:make-3.81-arm-1.txz
s:mpfr-3.1.0-arm-1.txz
s:patch-2.6.1-arm-1.txz
s:perl-modules-5.14.2-arm-1.txz
s:uClibc-0.9.33_git-arm-1.txz
s:which-2.20-arm-1.txz

Now exit and re-login via ssh, as some commands are built-in to the original shell and the shell needs restarting to pick up new improved versions... Then initialise ldconfig - this is required later on for the build script to work:

ldconfig

Now we've got all the FFP pre-requists in place, we can get on with building the CPAN libraries. First we need somewhere to do the build - I've chosen (arbitrarily) to do the build on the FFP stick itself:

mkdir /ffp/funpkg/build
mkdir /ffp/funpkg/build/lms-7.9
cd /ffp/funpkg/build/lms-7.9

Clone the git repository for the CPAN library source stuff:

git clone git://github.com/Logitech/slimserver-vendor.git
cd slimserver-vendor
git checkout public/7.9

(Digression: this will get you the head of tree code for 7.9. There are other branches available, which you can list with 'git branch -a'. I don't think there is any benefit of chosing an older version even if you were building for LMS 7.8.0/1 though - the 7.9 version should be ok).
Now change to the build directory:

cd CPAN

We can't use the provided buildme.sh as it is because the ffp perl isn't in the standard location, nor is it one of the listed versions (14.2). The following copies the buildme.sh to our own version (build-ffp.sh) and patches it with the attached build-ffp.patch. The patched script also avoids re-running the DBI build twice and avoids some problematic tests, saving a lot of time. (Change the following as appropriate to copy build-ffp.patch into the current directory).

cp /mnt/HD_a2/public/lms-ffp-stuff/build-ffp.patch .
cp buildme.sh build-ffp.sh
patch -p0 < build-ffp.patch

(Digression: if there are significant changes in the future to buildme.sh, the attached patch may no longer work. But the CPAN stuff looks to be fairly stable now, so I don't expect much to change).
Now we can do the build. For convenience, I use 'script' here to get a full log of all output in build-ffp.log (finished by the exit).

script build-ffp.log
./build-ffp.sh
exit

The build will take a few hours! After it completes, have a quick check through the build-ffp.log file in case there were any errors... Now that's over, the built CPAN libraries will have ended up in /ffp/funpkg/build/lms-7.9/slimserver-vendor/CPAN/build/arch. Given the stability of cpan stuff, we shouldn't have to go through this exercise again for quite a while, and can continue to use these same libraries over many iterations of LMS nightly updates. The arch directory simply needs to be copied into the CPAN/arch directory of the LMS distribution/nightly tarball.
Our next step is to get LMS itself. First we need somewhere to put it. I've chosen (arbitrarily) to put this under /ffp/lib/lms, separating the cache, prefs and logs directories from the distribution:

mkdir /ffp/lib/lms
mkdir /ffp/lib/lms/cache
mkdir /ffp/lib/lms/prefs
mkdir /ffp/lib/lms/logs
chown -R nobody:nobody /ffp/lib/lms
cd /ffp/lib/lms

Now get the 7.9 arm-linux Nightlies. We're not using the noCPAN ones, as they are missing transcode binaries and required setup. We simply discard the CPAN/arch directory of the arm-linux version and replace it with our own. Note that we could have also built our own transcode binaries. The ones provided in the arm-linux Nightlies seem to work, however, so I've not bothered. The URL for the nightlies changes daily - look at downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/ for the correct link. The following is just an example:

wget http://downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/7.9/sc/eec2100/logitechmediaserver-7.9.0-1417798448-arm-linux.tgz

Extract lms and replace the arch directory with ours:

tar xvf logitechmediaserver-7.9.0-1417798448-arm-linux.tgz
rm lms-current
ln -s logitechmediaserver-7.9.0-1417798448-arm-linux lms-current
cd lms-current
rm -r CPAN/arch
cp -r /ffp/funpkg/build/lms-7.9/slimserver-vendor/CPAN/build/arch CPAN

[Edit 13 Feb 2017:] For some reason the CPAN build has a more up-to-date version of Image::Scale than the the perl module in the Nightly builds (0.11 vs 0.08), so we also need to copy the Scale.pm for this version:

cp /ffp/funpkg/build/lms-7.9/slimserver-vendor/CPAN/build/5.14/lib/perl5/arm-linux-thread-multi-64int/Image/Scale.pm CPAN/Image/

Make sure the user running the daemon (nobody) owns the lms directories:

chown -R nobody:nobody /ffp/lib/lms

Finally we need to setup a startup script. I've attached one as 'lms.txt' - as I'm not allowed to attach a filename ending in .sh... This needs copying and renaming to /ffp/start/lms.sh - modify the following to suit where you are copying it from:

cd /ffp/start
cp /mnt/HD_a2/public/lms-ffp-stuff/lms.txt ./lms.sh
chmod a+x lms.sh

To start LMS:

/ffp/start/lms.sh start

and to stop:

/ffp/start/lms.sh stop

[Edit 13 Feb 2017: there is now a further hack in this startup script to copy /ffp/etc/protocols to /etc/protocols, because the ffp version of perl was built expecting that file in the /etc directory]

To update to the latest nightly, stop LMS, cd /ffp/lib/lms and run all the steps above again from wget.... to chown... The new version will be symbolically linked from /ffp/lib/lms/lms-current, keeping the old versions in case you want to revert...

[Edit 24 Feb 2017:]
See Post#35 for instructions on how to add HTTPS/SSL support to this.

[slackhead]

Just wanted to say thank you Utgg for the brilliant install guide.

I've been meaning to try installing LMS on my NSA325 for a good while but wasn't too sure about all the steps. Your instructions are very complete and easy to follow and I now have the latest 7.9 nightly running smoothly. It would have taken me an age to sort it all out myself.

One extra thing I've done is to install ffmpeg so that the recent changes to BBC iPlayer Live streams will play. I did this with:

slacker -UaA br2:ffmpeg2/

I need to check how well the transcoding of flac to mp3 works as I like stream to my phone when I'm out and about from time to time. But so far I'm pretty impressed.

Thanks again.

[utgg]

Yes, I too was able to get the BBC HLS streams going as soon as bpa gave us the info on how to use ffmpeg to transcode. Such is the advantage of having a reasonably standard linux system to play with. It seems that the ffp people are also up to date on their ffmpeg package builds as well, avoiding all the hoops those on Raspberry Pis and the like have been jumping through...

[feixar]

Hi utgg,

First of all, a big thanks for the step-by-step walkthrough you've listed here. It's great!

However, a small update might be required, and I suspect it's related to the patch that's no longer 100% correct. I've followed your manual and something goes wrong during the build. At the end of the process, no 'arch' folder was created. The log gives me the following error message:

 
chmod 755 blib/arch/auto/Linux/Inotify2/Inotify2.so
cp Inotify2.bs blib/arch/auto/Linux/Inotify2/Inotify2.bs
chmod 644 blib/arch/auto/Linux/Inotify2/Inotify2.bs
PERL_DL_NONLAZY=1 /e-data/4aafd256-5c29-47a7-bcb6-c979032c119b/ffproot/ffp/bin/perl5.14.2 "-MExtUtils::Command::MM" "-e" "test_harness(0, 'blib/lib', 'blib/arch')" t/*.t
t/00_load.t ..... 
t/00_load.t ..... 1/1 
                       
t/00_load.t ..... ok
t/01_inotify.t .. 
t/01_inotify.t .. 1/5 
#   Failed test 'watch created for directory 26499'
#   at t/01_inotify.t line 11.
Can't call method "cancel" on an undefined value at t/01_inotify.t line 27.
# Looks like you planned 5 tests but ran 4.
# Looks like you failed 1 test of 4 run.
# Looks like your test exited with 11 just after 4.

                       
t/01_inotify.t .. Dubious, test returned 11 (wstat 2816, 0xb00)
Failed 2/5 subtests 

Test Summary Report
-------------------
t/01_inotify.t (Wstat: 2816 Tests: 4 Failed: 1)
  Failed test:  2
  Non-zero exit status: 11
  Parse errors: Bad plan.  You planned 5 tests but ran 4.
Files=2, Tests=5,  1 wallclock secs ( 0.23 usr  0.01 sys +  0.42 cusr  0.03 csys =  0.69 CPU)
Result: FAIL
Failed 1/2 test programs. 1/5 subtests failed.
make: *** [test_dynamic] Error 11
make test failed, aborting
root@NSA325-v2:/ffp/funpkg/build/lms-7.9/slimserver-vendor/CPAN# exit
exit

Script done on Mon Mar  9 08:38:29 2015

I've repeated the whole process a few times but I always end up here. Any idea what the problem & solution might be?

Thank you very much in advance!

Best,

Koen