F4-220

F4-220

All info about hacking a TerraMaster F4-220 to run OpenMediaVault (OMV) Aim : take an OK NAS enclosure, upgrade it and add some Debian to make it awesome

Introduction

I was offered a Terramaster F4-220 last christmas. I installed TOS (TerraMaster OS) but it is garbage. Very few fonctionalities, only half a dozen available softwares. So I looked around to make it better.

How to open your F4-220

I won't spend too long on this as other people have done videos about it. Particularilly this one (hardware here is a 2 disks F2-220 but it is really close to the F4) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF2DHxoc83Q or this one for RAM upgrade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3kNSVDVhMM

Please note that this youtuber uses a VGA cable to install an OS (around 2:00). I won't do the same as I don't own such cable.

Hardware upgrades

Celeron J1800 ( http://ark.intel.com/products/78866/Intel-Celeron-Processor-J1800-1M-Cache-up-to-2_58-GHz )
2G RAM (upgradable to 4G)
Boot on 8G USB (upgraded to 16G SSD and 3.2 USB to SATA cable)

OS is stored on an 8G bootable USB key as a primary drive. I replaced it by a more sturdy SSD disk using an USB to SATA cable. OMV people insist on not installing on an USB stick (which make totally sense). Also, SSDs are inexpensive and fast these days...

F4-220 NASes have 2G of soldered RAM but once opened, you can easilly upgrade RAM to 4G with (TerraMaster sells them on amazon using part number KBM20056)

What distro to install

http://openmediavault.org is pretty good for a home setup. Dozens of available softwares, good forums and support.

The big caveat for me was to do a headless install as I do not have a VGA cable. Fortunately there are people who have already done this :

http://forum.openmediavault.org/index.php/Thread/3453-Installing-OMV-w-o-keyboard-and-monitor-using-VirtualBox/

IMPORTANT If you are going to use the above guide, please note, due to recent changes in how networking in handled in linux, in OMV 4 or higher the networking interface will be detected as ENS33 and you will not get an ip when you attempt to move the usb back to the nas as the networking config will not attempt to request an ip address on eth0 (the local adapter)

Kindly see the guide below for information on how to resolve this. after making the change, you will need to reboot the VM and run OMV-firstaid to reset the networking config. https://www.itzgeek.com/how-tos/mini-howtos/change-default-network-name-ens33-to-old-eth0-on-ubuntu-16-04.html

In my case, I used vmware and mapped the usb drive as a physical device, ran the install, made the above change, and plugged the drive directly into the hardware and it now works, you may need to run omv-firstaid again once you boot into hardware if you get an error when trying to load the webui.

Please also note, there is a known kernel issue with baytrail devices that cause the device to hang on OMV3 as a workaroud you can disable the cstate C1 or use OMV 4 which has a kernal patch that resolves this. (please note, this is only applicable to the baytrail devices that terramaster makes)

OMV Installation and configuration

https://openmediavault.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation/index.html