What is it?

This is a cheap network attached storage device. Comes with 10/100MHz Ethernet
and has 2 external USB connecters for additional hard drives or printers.
I got mine from buy.com for $140 with free shipping. Inside sits a 500GB
Western Digital drive (WD5000AAJB-00UHA0).

The shares are accessible through Samba/CIFS and NFS (and the web interface,
of course).

The native file system used is reiserfs.

What's special?

This device is almost identical to a Western Digital NetCenter or a Maxtor
Shared Storage drive. Pretty much same system board with same Broadcom
components. What's nice with the SimpleShare is that it comes with iShare
software that allows you to access the drive from the internet. You do need to
set up a special account with www.simpleshare.com.

Firmware

The 500GB SimpleShare versions run version 1.10 (Build 331) of the firmware.
Devices with less capacity run 1.07 and do not have iShare capabilities.
The firmware is a common trx (see also Linksys WRT65G) packaged Linux kernel
(piggy.gz) and root file system. The file system is in the form of a cramfs
image.

Hacking

It is easy to get into the box even without altering the firmware.
There's a /usr/sbin/st_startup.sh script that runs at boot.
Almost at the end of it, it runs the command:

sh /shares/SimplePool/ShareApps/ext-script.sh

All you have to do is supply the ext-script.sh (it is non-existent on a
pristine machine). Via any of the access mechanisms (Samba, NFS, web) create
a new share called ShareApps (all shares really reside in /shares/SimplePool).
Then upload the file ext-script.sh to that folder. There is a telnet daemon
available: /bin/utelnetd.

Hard drive spin-down

I have noticed that unlike the WD NetCenter, the SimpleShare does not
spin-down its disk after a period of non-activity. I have to investigate
this. I believe the disk itself supports this. I will have to use /sbin/hdparm
to check the disk's capabilities and alter the spin-down setting. Maybe there
is also a nvram variable involved (/usr/sbin/nvram show).

-----------------------
Geert