install on 320l A4

[Daniel Atkin]

sorry really Noob question can alt-f4 be installed on a DNS320L I believe its a A4 revision ? 

 

Im a little concerned I may brick it with the A3 version 

Many Thanks

[Chris G]

I recently installed on to a rev A3 that had been sitting on a shelf since purchase many years ago. It did'nt kill it.

From new SMB protocol was slow as molasses and unreliable. NFS protocol never worked. D-link abandoned the product.

Since installing ALT-F firmware :

* SMB (configured smb 2 min, smb3 max) can be seen and used by Windows 10 clients but transfer rates remain deathly slow. My Android phone also can see  and connect. A Kodi based appliance cannot see its SMB shares at all despite hours of debuggging.

* Miraculously NFS mounts can now be seen and used by Windows & Linux boxes. Transfer rates remain very slow but usable.

* Memory usage on the DNS-320L rev A3 we have climbs to near 100% requiring reboots ~ daily.

I'm not sure its worth the effort except as an exercise or last ditch attempt to extract at least some meagre value...

[João Cardoso]

On Monday, December 28, 2020 at 3:23:28 AM UTC 2fa...@gmail.com wrote:

I recently installed on to a rev A3 that had been sitting on a shelf since purchase many years ago. It did'nt kill it.

From new SMB protocol was slow as molasses and unreliable. NFS protocol never worked. D-link abandoned the product.

Since installing ALT-F firmware :

* SMB (configured smb 2 min, smb3 max) can be seen and used by Windows 10 clients but transfer rates remain deathly slow. My Android phone also can see  and connect. A Kodi based appliance cannot see its SMB shares at all despite hours of debuggging.

SMB3 is not supported, max protocol is SMB2. The default is to have max = min = SMB2

I have no issues with Kody (or other apps) on my android TV.

Have you installed wsdd2? It is needed for plain (not SMB1 enabled) win10

 

* Miraculously NFS mounts can now be seen and used by Windows & Linux boxes. Transfer rates remain very slow but usable.

Read throughput (btrfs over RAID1 on a DNS-320L):

SMB1: 42,6 MBps 

SMB2: 30,4 MBps

FTP: 46,8 MBps

* Memory usage on the DNS-320L rev A3 we have climbs to near 100% requiring reboots ~ daily.

The status reported free memory is not an issue! using 100% of memory in linux is a sign of health, as long as swap is not being used. 

My dns-325 has been up by "Uptime: 100 day(s) 20 hour(s)", providing SMB2 and NFS daily backups to three PCs, and occasional streaming (minidlna) to the TV.

Of course if you use memory intensive programs, 128MB of memory will be an issue

[Chris G]

Hi João,

Firstly, my sincere and heartfelt thanks to those who managed to hack together an alternative firmware for the abandon-ware DNS' NAS units.

Secondly, thanks for the informative response!

- SMB2/3 - thanks for clarifying. I have my DNS-320L revA3 using Alt-F currently set as SMB1 UNchecked, SMB2 checked in Services/Network/SMB/Configure.

- Win10 Pro LAN clients do not have SMB1 enabled and can see/connect (albeit flakily, but that's probably on Micro$oft).

- Android phone WiFi LAN client using the X-plore file management app can see and connect (allegedly SMB2).

- Embedded Linux/Kodi device attached to my TV cannot see any SMB share (from any device) on the LAN. The device is called Xero4K+ - its running a factory installed OSMC (Custom Debian/Kodi distro). Per your advice I have configured the device to use SMB2 min/max and disabled the SMB2 mitigation (whatever that is). Even after cold booting the DNS-320L and all clients it stubbornly refuses to 'see' any SMB shares but happily see's/connects to NFS shares provided by the D-link.. It is becoming obvious I will need to follow this up with the OSMC guys.

- Throughput was never a strong point of the DNS-320L from new, but with no additional programs running on Alt-f and its default 256mb RAM it should cope fine with simple file serving on our LAN.

- I'm envious of those file transfer figures! We are using EXT4 file system in RAID 0 on our DNS-320L over 1Gb Ethernet. Will have to experiment/tweak further... 

- Yes, I'm aware Linux aggressively uses all free RAM for 'caching'. Its just always a bit disconcerting to see 93% in use though, but no swap in use thankfully.

Again, thank you for the informative reply and wishing you and your loved ones safe happy holidays.

[Jeremy Laidman]

> * Miraculously NFS mounts can now be seen and used by Windows & Linux boxes. Transfer rates remain very slow but usable.

Can you tell me how you get Windows to see NFS mounts? Is there some software or driver that's required to be installed on Windows?

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[Chris G]

Windows 10 Pro can add NFS protocol support :

1. Install the NFS Client

1. Click on the Cortana search box -> type in Control Panel -> choose the first option from the top.
2. Click the Programs and Features option.
3. Click the option Turn Windows features on or off from the left side menu.
4. Inside the Windows Features window -> scroll down and check the box next to Services for NFS  -> press Ok.
5. This will start the installation process.
6. After the process is completed, you can Close the Windows Features window and follow the next method
   

1. You still will not see the shares in Windows explorer but you will be able to connect.
   

[Chris G]

This makes life easier:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/nfsclient/

[Chris G]

Just a quick follow up :

I dramatically improved reliability and speed of SMB networking to the DNS-320L by changing some settings on my Asus RT-AC68U gateway router - Enabled SMB sharing, Enabled Master Browser, Enabled WINS. Configuring all SMB clients to use the gateway server Master Browser & WINS Server helps tremendously. The other thing I did was configure all SMB clients and servers (including the ALT-F firmware D-link DNS-320L to use SMB1 min/SMB3(2) max. Now everything is browseable, relaible and decently quick on my home LAN. Thanks you so much to the dev's of this firmware - I raised an abandoned device from the dead! :-)

On Tuesday, 29 December 2020 at 08:34:58 UTC+13 João Cardoso wrote: