Thecus n299 has a serial interface (no replies)

I was inspecting some of the garbage I have in storage to see if there was something I could (not) throw away.

I had bought a used Thecus n299 nas box (2 sata, 2 gigabit eth, unpopulated mini-PCI slot, some USB, crappy processor, 128MB ram) http://thecus.nas-central.org/wiki/Category:N299 some time ago because it was on sale at 10$ with 2x 500GB drives inside, so after I bought it I just opened it, removed the drives to use them somewhere else and put it into storage where it remained for a few centuries.

By looking at the page linked above it has a full serial controller onboard, so I looked if I could find it.

And I found it.

It's the header near the lights on the front, near the serial controller chip.

It is longer than a serial connector so I had to use some jumper wires to connect a serial header connector.

I whipped out my old serial null-modem cable and my usb-serial adapter, and yes, the bootloader and firmware show up in the serial terminal at 115200 8N1 settings

GPIO0_17 is 1, SDRAM is Samsung/Hynix
N299 Boot Loader [Linux], version 1.0.2
Built by linux, 16:45:31, Feb 27 2008

Processor: SL3516c2
CPU Rate: 320000000
AHB Bus Clock:160MHz    Ratio:2/1
MAC 1 Address: 00:50:C2:2B:D0:01
192.168.0.200/255.255.255.0
==> enter ^C to abort bootingeconds ...Load Kern image from 0x30020000 to 0x1600000 size 2097152
Load Ramdisk image from 0x30220000 to 0x800000 size 4194304
�Linux version 2.6.15 (root@second.com) (gcc version 3.4.4) #561 Wed Feb 27 16:41:46 CST 2008
CPU: FA526id(wb) [66015261] revision 1 (ARMv4)
Machine: GeminiA
Ignoring unrecognised tag 0x00000000
Memory policy: ECC disabled, Data cache writeback
CPU0: D VIVT write-back cache
CPU0: I cache: 16384 bytes, associativity 2, 16 byte lines, 512 sets
CPU0: D cache: 8192 bytes, associativity 2, 16 byte lines, 256 sets
Built 1 zonelists
Kernel command line: root=24 (order: 10, 16384 bytes)
Bus: 160MHz(2/1)
n't exist

Dentry cache entries: 325, 131072 bInode-cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
ailable (2827K code, 925K data, 108K init)
Mount-cache hash table entries: 512
*** Page_chain_cachep Init!***
CPU: Testing write buffer coherency: ok
checking if image is initramfs...it isn't (no cpio magic); looks like an initrd
Freeing initrd memory: 16384K
NET: Registered protocol family 16
PCI: bus0: Fast back to back transfers disabled
sl2312_pci_map_irq : slot = 0  pin = 1 
Sistered new driver usbfs
usbcore: registered new driver hub
Initial RAID Descripter...
XOR:tx_desc = ff000000
XOR:rx_desNetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.97 (double precision)
VFS: Disk quotas dquot_6.5.1
Dquot-cache hash table entries: 1024 (order 0, 4096 bytes)
Installing knfsd (copyright (C) 1996 okir@monad.swb.de).
NTFS driver 2.1.25 [Flags: R/O].
Initializing Cryptographic API
io scheduler noop registered
io scheduler deadline registered
Real Time Clock Driver v0.10
Gemini Gpio init
Register Gemini Power control
Power event by Unknow Source 
Watchdog Timer Initialized
***************************************
******AC power resume test*************
*******CRE4[6:5] is 00******
*******CRE6[4] is 1******
*******CRE7[4] is 1******
N299 one button copy init OK.
ttySL0 at MMIO 0x478003f8 (irq = 20) is a IT871SL2312 CFI Flash: Found 1 x16 devices at 0x0 in 16-bit bank
 Amd/Fujitsu Extended Query Table at 0x0040
Using buffer write method
number of CFI chips: 1
cfinInfo=20000e=1
cfi_cmdset_0002: Disabling erase-suspend-program due to code brokenness.
Creating 8 MTD partitions on "SL2312 CFI Flash":
 jenny master->erasesize is 20000 
0x00000000-0x00020000-0x00020000 : "RedBoot"
0x0002000 : "Kernel"
0x00220000-0x00620000-0x00400000 : "Ramdisk"
0x007a0000-0x007c0000-0x00020000 : "VCTL"
0x007c0000-0x007e0000-0x00020000 : "CurConf"
0x007e0000-0x00800000-0x00020000 : "FIS directory"
0x00fe0000-0x01000000-0x00020000 : "MAC backup"
SL2312 MTD Driver Init Success ......
iver initialized: 16 RAze
Thecus : Init thecus event proc entry . 
PPP generic driver version 2.4.2
PPP Deflate Compression module registered
PPP BSD Compression module registered
NET: Registered protocol family 24
tun: Universal TUN/TAP device driver, 1.6
tun: (C) 1999-2004 Max Krasnyansky <maxk@qualcomm.com>
gmac_init_module: GMAC1 enable
VSC-switch not found
SL351x Giga Ethernet driver 0.1.5 built at Feb 27 2008 16:39:32
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ide 0: physical = 63000000, virtual = c9802000, irq = 4
    ide0: MMIO-DMA , BIOS settings: hda:pio, hdb:pio
ide 1: physical = 63400000, virtual = c9804000, irq = 5
    ide1: MMIO-DMA , BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio

I'm not going to do much with this for a while (if at all) as it is not powerful enough to be worth it, but it seems its SoC has some kind of support from openwrt and mainline linux, also the firmware source seems to be here http://gpl.nas-central.org/THECUS/N199-N299/n299_n199_1.00.24_GPL.tar.bz2 (rehosted by nas central as Thecus link is dead)

Still, this isn't total garbage so will stay in storage for some more time.