ReadyShare, no love for Ext3 and Ext2 DGNG3700V2

[huhugrub]

Hi There,

I've recently purchase a DGND3700V2 and its going well, lots of Disco lights at the front make for an interesting conversion piece for sure.... except....

I scowled the net for my solution about mounting ext3 drives, but I fear its just down to disk compatibility issues, even so I'd thought I'd share my experience with everyone.

I have 2 external USB drives, 2TB and 640MB, both from Western Digital, and both connect fine with NTFS to the modem. Great, what's the problem? I was wanting 1 drive to be a download drive so requires quick(er) I/O, and as everyone has said, NTFS is slow on this modem.

So I formatted my 640gb drive to ext3 using Windows MiniTool program and Linux via a live CD GParted. The minitool prog appears to be a bit dodgy even to GParted disk tool, so stuck to GParted, and formatted the drive to ext3. The partition table was all valid when checked on the GParted shell with fdisk -l, but placing the drive on the modem fails to mount to readyshare.

So I'd though I'll go in via the telnet back door of the modem to find out why it fails to mount. Using the debug activation web call "192.168.0.1/setup.cgi?todo=debug" to enable telnet, and then logged into the modem.

Issuing a df command shows that the drive isn't mounted... hmmm!
Issuing fdisk -l shows the drive is detectable on the machine, but shows an error within the partition table, saying the physical location does not match the logical location or some such thing... So the O/S is reading the wrong/incomplete information about the disk partition?

I also noticed that the modem is using a custom NTFS program to mount the drive so isn't using O/S drivers as such, and gives me the reason why NTFS works and EXT3 fails, and why NTFS is slower than normal.

Since formatting ext2 and ext3 drives tables quite a lot of time, I switched over to USB thumb drive. Again, NTFS format on a thumb drive mounts fine, but format it to ext2 or ext3 fails with partition table error? However, I was able to mount the drive manually via:

mkdir /mnt/shares/test
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/shares/test

and then copy files and unmount it via:

cp somefile /mnt/shares/test
umount /mnt/shares/test

Unfortunately mounting it manually via telnet does not make it appear in ReadyShare..... so come on Netgear guys, this is a fairly simple solution, they are only USB external drives, why is this so hard to do, no wonder consumers pull out their hair on this stuff!

[huhugrub]

Ok, more info. The errors associated with fdisk -l appears to most irrelevant, it has to do with partition block alignment. So I used the fdisk util within the router to create the partitions and all was good. I then used GParted to format my usb drive to EXT3, so far all good.

Plugged my newly formatted drive into the router, but readyshare software still fails to detect it. Ok, tried fdisk -l again, partition table all good and is identified as linux! Truely odd!

I then mounted my ext3 usb drive to /mnt/shares/j and it mounts fine!

mkdir /mnt/shares/j
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/shares/j


Tried running usb detections script

/sbin/rc_app/rc_usb_service mount

still no love, it appears to only want to mount NTFS drives!
I can manually mount the drive but ReadyShare refuses to mount it or even try!

So has anyone been about to mount ext3 filesystem on DGNG3700V2 modem... I'm starting to think its not possible!

[huhugrub]

Also, tried this with ext2 format, I was unable to mount ext2 formatted drives at all, not even manually with the mount command.

[huhugrub]

huhugrub wrote:
So has anyone been about to mount ext3 filesystem on DGNG3700V2 modem... I'm starting to think its not possible!

No replies, Hmm, I guess not.

First DLNA that dies from lack of router memory when it scans media content, I can understand that, but give an option to override this to just provide media content on the fly like the HTTP service does?

And now EXT2/EXT3 file systems not supported out of the box? Well I tried my best to get it going and will do some more investigating about mount SMB shares via internal commands, but it won't be a plug and play option.

[Fenno70]

Readyshare is awful. I purchased this unit to circumvent my issues with homegroup networking as the main PC is Win 8 and none of the other Win 7's would connect. I thought this would be handy for sharing the printer and some movies/tv with a USB.

Well the sharing via this unitturned out to be a complete dud as the router would crash everytime I connected a USB (big/small didn't matter) - I don't think it copes with DLNA at all in Win 8. Anyone elese have it working? Also the USB Connecter software worked fine on my ASUS notebook but not on the Win 7 PCs.

The irony is that the homegroup now works and I have 3 notebooks connected plus the printer now shares across network. The streaming performance of devices connected to wireless is also better so I'll just leave HDDs connected to my ASUS.

I have noticed the speed is about 20% slower than the TP-LINK W88961ND I previously had however it seems more stable (from downloading a couple of torrents) and the speed is a lot more consistent. Videos from my iPhone and iPad load much much quicker (sorry this isn't scientific)

It almost went back to the store however after some tinkering and getting the homegroup working I am happy.

So for anyone looking at this forget it for sharing a USB and printer - buy it for the wireless quality, dual band and stable connection (although have noticed it doesn't reconnect itself after dropouts).

[huhugrub]

Fenno70 wrote:
So for anyone looking at this forget it for sharing a USB and printer - buy it for the wireless quality, dual band and stable connection (although have noticed it doesn't reconnect itself after dropouts).

I have to agree with you here, for a modem/router's main task it performs really well. For the addition features/services they could of done a lot better.... maybe open WRT may come to rescue in the future?

Additional things I've noticed.... it doesn't look like the router is being pushed that hard with CPU load. Doing a top command to see cpu work load shows USB and NTFS_3g process consuming ~60% of the available CPU under full disk transfer load, that other 40% is idle? This could suggest some I/O blocking and/or buffer issue?

[huhugrub]

huhugrub wrote:
Additional things I've noticed.... it doesn't look like the router is being pushed that hard with CPU load. Doing a top command to see cpu work load shows USB and NTFS_3g process consuming ~60% of the available CPU under full disk transfer load, that other 40% is idle? This could suggest some I/O blocking and/or buffer issue?

Opps, looks like the 40% missing load was associated with the NIC.

Managed to mount and my ext3 partition/drive and hacked in a samba share to test transfer speed of this format.

Result, write speed : ~8 mega-bytes a second, read speed ~6 megabytes a second.... strange the write speed it faster than read speed? Either that or Windows is calculating the transfer incorrectly?

So the result is ext3 is around 2 times faster than ntfs.

So I'm building an auto mount script, and will post the details.... it won't be for the faint heart to implement as it means re-purposing the rc_usb_service process and samba config file, though the changes wont be complex as such...

[huhugrub]

Unfortunately I shan't be releasing be the script for the DGND3700V2 as I feel they are no idiot proof enough for the general public... basically I don't feel safe that someone won't end up with a bricked router through some unknown command they ran as these script alter usb internals quite significantly.

If however, you are an experience Unix user and are comfortable to read through my shell scripts, let me know and I'll provide it to you such as they are (no warranty or liabilities) ...

I will however outline the process I have taken to give you some idea of what's involved. Upon inserting a USB device, the DGND3700V2 will detect the event and issued the command /sbin/rc_apps/rc_usb_service mount

luckily this rc_usb_service is a symbolic link to a different program, much like busybox. This allowed me to implement a jumper of sorts to wedge in my mount commands to load up linux ext3 mount devices and create a new samba file share. So when a usb device is connected, it runs my version of the mount process first, then I call the original mount process... below is the install process...


0) mount / root file system as read/write and copy mounting script into /usr/etc/linux_usb_mounter_hack
1) backup and move /sbin/rc_apps/rc_usb_service to /usr/etc/linux_usb_mounter_hack
2) the /sbin/samba.conf/smb.conf is altered with an include file to allow the building of samba shares (takes affect after a reboot)
3) create symbolic link to point to new custom mount process in /usr/etc/linux_usb_mounter_hack which will mount linux drives, and create new samba shares then call the original rc_usb_service command.
4) create the uninstall script.
5) once installed, reboot router and try your mount process with an ext3 drive.

Again, while I'd like to release this script to the general public I feel its too fragile in the wrong hands and could render your router bricked.

If someone is willing to test them and after a few people have done it I may reconsider a public release.

[wolframarnold]

Thanks huhugrub for researching this and posting your findings. I ran into similar troubles but ran out of time after I got the disk to mount from the telnet shell. I'm glad I found your post.

I was disappointed that ext3 isn't supported out of the box. Given that the router runs Linux that should be the most straightforward thing to do. I just messaged you privately for your scripts, would be very interested in reviewing and trying.

[huhugrub]

sent a reply ...

[richud]

I dont know if this is of any help but if you trade the v2 in on fleaBay for a v1 you can use my firmware that supports ext2/3 etc.

[huhugrub]

richud wrote:
I dont know if this is of any help but if you trade the v2 in on fleaBay for a v1 you can use my firmware that supports ext2/3 etc.

I'd rather keep the V1 as it supports more features (except minidlna which is just broken), and I've managed to get ext3 to work in V2 via my script hack.

[huhugrub]

oops... should be v2 not v1

[richud]

interesting, ext support wasn't in the kernel on the v1.

just out of interest what does the v2 do extra, I thought the feature set was about the same.

(ironically I bought mine on fleabay and it was supposed to be a v2 , but turned out to be a v1 when it arrived - I kept it due to having double the memory)

[w3wilkes]

@Richud, From reading this forum it sounds like one of the more common "features" of the v2 is that some users are finding that their wireless devices cannot see or communicate with their wired devices like if they had set wireless isolation on. It also sounds like this does not happen with all wireless devices.

[wolframarnold]

I've looked at the script, and the general steps make sense. What I'm missing is how to mount ext3 and create a samba share, the custom mount process in your step 3

3) create symbolic link to point to new custom mount process in /usr/etc/linux_usb_mounter_hack which will mount linux drives, and create new samba shares then call the original rc_usb_service command.

Can you go into a little more detail? Thanks!

[neil_townsend]

@huhugrub would it be possible to have the script please? I've developped an modded firmware for the 3700v2 and it would make sense to add your script in. Or, if you wuld like to add it in via github, that would be great!

[neil_townsend]

Hi, would it be possible to see this script? I've been developping a variant firmware for the router with various bits tweaked and improved and I'd love to add this in. Thanks! Neil