ASUSTOR AS-6XXT

This repo contains my notes and debugging data from turning an ASUSTOR AS-604T into a Debian machine (almost fully featured).

It’s an unordered mess.

There be dragons.

Proceed at your own peril.

Progress

Pretty much everything I need is working.

What works

• Heat sensors (CPU, Motherboard)
• Fan speed adjustment
  • Via kernel module it87-wdt (pwm1)
• Toggling LEDs
  • Via kernel module gpio-it87 (see gpio for pins)
• Adjust LED brightness
  • Via kernel module it87-wdt (pwm3)
• LCD (working on a separate project for this)
  • Display text
  • Read button input
  • Sleep

What doesn’t

• Turning of the HDD leds (via Marvell 88SE9215)
  • Don’t know how to access the Marvell chip
• System buzzer (via ITE IT8728F)
• Blinking leds
  • This could be achieved relatively easily with some modifications to e.g. tomtastic/qnap-gpio which uses a similar ITE chip

My setup

If you’re interested.

• Boot via external USB drive
  • Contains /boot/asloader.efi
  • I re-purposed the 4th parititon of internal flash for /boot, it used to contain the stock App Central package bundle
• Debian with full disk encryption (raid-1)
  • Unlock via SSH
• A second raid-1 (scratch disk)
• RAM: 1x 4GB (ADATA AD3S1333W4G9-R)
  • Replaced the internal 1GB RAM module
  • Upgrading RAM on the system was problematic (slowed system to a crawl)
    • See initramfs for more info

Why did I start this?

Well, this had happened by itself:

And the AS-6XXT series runs a kernel that’s TOO… DAMN… OLD. It’s 3.12.20 if you must know.

So, I fixed the heatsink and got to work.