is ximeta dead company?

I suggest you sending a mail to swengineer@ximeta.com, at least they answered me a question a few months ago. I suppose no one is reading the tickets, there's so much trash and nobody seems to take control.

Regards.

I've sent a mail to support@ximeta.com and recived this:

Dear Customer,

Unfortunately we no longer support Linux so we cannot assist you for this.
You can visit code.ximeta.com to see if you can gain any additional information to
help you for your Linux build.

Thank you,

I'll try the above mail... who knows...

I emailed support with the following:

The web site  code.xineta.com is not maintained and is being
vandalized. Front page was removed a few hours ago.

Is your company dieing?

Are GPL code maintainers welcome?

Will kernel 2.6.24 be supported?

Did the linux guy get fired?

If I receive no answer, I may fork and maintain a driver for people
who bought the hardware but cannot use it because of lack of driver
for recent linux distributions.

thanks for your time.

lm

And got this back

Dear Customer,

       Due to the lack of interest in Linux driver support Ximeta no longer
supports Linux which is why the website is no longer being maintained by our
Linux engineer.

Thank you,
 
Peter Chow
Technical Support Engineer
Ximeta Inc.
http://www.ximeta.com/web/support/
510-683-9700

I have taken a zip archive of the latest svn tag 1.1.20 from 4 weeks ago, I will try and make it compile on 2.6.24. If you ( or anyone) wants to help me keep this alive, I/we can setup something on sf.net ( or elsewere). I did not grab all the stuff from the wiki ( that would be nice, anyone skilled with squid or wget or something that will leach it all before it goes away?).

I will post back here when/if I pursue this.

Please manifest yourselves!

I will post an email or web site when i have a minute or two to set something up.

Thanks.

Replying to anonymous:

- No tarball for linux driver since 6 months. still 1.1-15 while 1.1-20 exists in SVN
- No svn commint since a month
- spams in ticketing system not moderated
- all tickets stalled

If you're dying, please opensource your driver so we can still use the device we bought.

Thanks

Use this email for further communications

ndas.gpl@gmail.com

i'm currently trying to use the driver with kernel 2.6.18. but that's not really working. the source would be really nice, maybe there will come some people together and work on that. i can do my best to contribute but have not much time left over. grabbing the stuff from the wiki should be not much work..i'll try to do that in the next couple days

Sad to see that the driver is not maintained anymore. I looked forward to use it with a kernel 2.6.24 (and later). Hope the Ximeta changes there mind.

Or one of you can keep it alive.

Replying to anonymous:

(...) I have taken a zip archive of the latest svn tag 1.1.20 from 4 weeks ago, I will try and make it compile on 2.6.24. If you ( or anyone) wants to help me keep this alive, I/we can setup something on sf.net ( or elsewere). I did not grab all the stuff from the wiki ( that would be nice, anyone skilled with squid or wget or something that will leach it all before it goes away?).

I will save all the content of the wiki tonight and I will send you by email (to ndas.gpl at gmail?). Anyway, I suppose we need some type of permission of Ximeta to fork the code. I cannot find the license, but I suspect it's not GPL.

Regards.

Yes you can send the wiki content there. A least it will kinda live, I can post it properly after...

I messed around with the driver, I discovered it is not GPL, it contains a binary blob to which I have no sources. The version released seems to be only i386 but I run amd64, so I cannot really test it or even use it... I did patch the sources a little to get it to compile against 2.6.24. I now I did nasty things and that it will not work... Without access to the source of ndas.o ( the core binary blob) it will not work on amd64 and will need further work to adapt the "legacy" ndas.o to newer kernels. I suspect someone will get back to us at some point, these emails are cc to swengineer@ximeta.com so someone is listening... Are you out there???

I am less exicted about this with me discoveries, however, if anyone as questions/input/interest, please email me and something migght come out of this...

Replying to jayraldyn:

Replying to anonymous: I cannot find the license, but I suspect it's not GPL.

Let's just call it abandoned for now. If they threaten to sue, we can always threaten to sue them back for damages by abandoning support without going open source ;-). I for one plan to return my device to the dealer I bought it from and call it misleading description.

Terrible...and I can't return my device. In my opinion it's very unlikely that the make the driver opensource, but hope dies last...

I must say I am quite disapointed as well. Just bought an NDAS device from Sungoo couple of days ago, and got quite excited by the technology until realising that linux driver does not support simultaneous r/w mounts from multiple machines. :-(

Not working at all for modern kernels is of course even more "fun". Ximeta made some half-hearted attempts to get its code included in linux distros couple of years ago, but the distros ignored them for obvious reasons - binary-only drivers under Linux have always been a mess.

At the moment, it seems the company is short of cash and half-defunct (are they bancrupt?), so I am not very surprised to see they are dropping Linux support. Even the company web page is falling apart. They do answer phone calls though, so I reckon they aren't completely dead yet. What I do not understand is why these disks aren't selling better in Windows-land???

Now I'll go and bother Sungoo about this, since I am their customer, not the customer of ximeta. Sad. :-(

Hi, Deno and the others.

If you want the SVN content, email me to jayraldyn at jayraldyn dot net and I will send you the tarball.

I'm also very unhappy with this: I've bough thi devices because it wax Linux compatible and now I cannot use it under Linux. Too bad. I will bug them and samsung.

-- eric

It'll be a great idea if someone with a good english could put this in some sites of linux interest (maybe slashdot?). I've put it in some spanish forums so people could get involved, for example http://barrapunto.com/article.pl?sid=08/04/11/200224

Thanks.

Well I am using Ubuntu 5.10, and I'm a newbie at that, so the lack of Ximeta support is a real kick in the pants. One of the reasons I bought the Mediagate device was it's core Linux OS, now I find out I can't even use my Ubuntu machine to upload files to the MG-45? Rats! The harder I try to leave Windoze the harder it gets.

<<Brad>>

Replying to anonymous:

- No tarball for linux driver since 6 months. still 1.1-15 while 1.1-20 exists in SVN
- No svn commint since a month
- spams in ticketing system not moderated
- all tickets stalled

If you're dying, please opensource your driver so we can still use the device we bought.

Thanks

Please either free the source or continue the linux support, I need it

hi all,

I'm using Slackware 12 and the driver works fine with my hardware, but I'm experiencing troubles with heavy load, eventually because of VFAT filesystem.

That's the reason me too i would have it supported!

And what when i will upgrade to a newer kernel? Shall I throw my external driver in the garbage??

I wonder where is the "lack of interest" they claim, i can see many tickets open...

So why don't they give us the sources? what's the profit in keeping it hided?

Regarding the wiki and SVN stuff, could you please send it to max_bld[at]tin[dot]it or could you give the URLs from where to start searching?

Thank you for your help, BR, Max.

Replying to max_bld[attin[dot]it]:

Hi.

You can find the SVN code in the download page, at http://code.ximeta.com/trac-ndas/wiki/Download but I'm afraid it's useless... at least for me. I've tried but I can't figure how to build something usable with the code. I suppose version 1.1-15 it's the only way to start with.

About "keeping it hidden", they say that "We want to protect our technology from the reverse-engineering", which is the reason of having parts of the code closed (a library called ndas.o). Without that part of code it'll be very difficult to branch the driver.

Regards.

Just a thought - wouldn't it be (theoretically) possible to reverse engineer the ndas.o as well? So why a closed source less attractive for reversen engineering than open source?

Replying to matt:

Just a thought - wouldn't it be (theoretically) possible to reverse engineer the ndas.o as well? So why a closed source less attractive for reversen engineering than open source?

I suppose it can be done, but the result would be a large piece of code in assembler and still without documentation (the APIs provided by ndas.o are undocumented, or I can't find it). I don't have enough skills to do it, but I would help anyone who dares.

Regards.

Hi all.

Take a look at the front page. "The team did not discontinue the NDAS software for Linux. Sorry for temporary misunderstanding."

That's good news. Let's see how it moves on. A version 1.1-20 is announced.

Regards.

Hi all

Continued development is a good birthday present for me today. Hopefully we soon have support for newer kernels as well. I have only one machine left on 2.6.18 to be able to access my drives from all other Linux and Solaris machines.

Thanks

Wonderfull news!

Thanks for all effort by everyone here.

Looking forward to the release that supports 2.6.24

Regards

Well.. Let's hope for the best, and my greetings to Linux guy at ximeta.

What I would love to see is a workplan stating the plans for getting the linux driver out of "beta" and allowing simultanious r/w access from multiple machines.

Now lookie here... looks like someone at ximeta came to their senses. Good to hear, thanks Ximeta, and the offer of development support still stands. (from others as much as from me I guess) Amazing what a few rants and threats of reverse engineering can do... ;-)

Dear users :

The NDAS software for linux 1.1-21 which supports 2.6.24 is just uploaded. As tested on few machines, we will keep monitoring the tickets and testing on our test machines.

Thank you.

Again one month without update in the trunk...even if there is a ""new"" kernel version out (which the driver does not support) and a bunch of open tickets...a little more info on the development process would be great...

We realy need an open source fork of the GPL part of the driver as the support sucks and the device is often unusable. Not to speak about stability and LSB compliance.

Sadly I don't have any programming skills.

For sure Ximeta is on my blacklist forever. :-(

I just got the contract for multiple small office networks and was about to recommend NDAS technology , but this days without Linux support it is dying technology , i was going to make a purchase of 75 units initially with lots of growth potential in the future but at that point i will have to turn to other NAS solutions. Hopefully somebody will help all the poor users that are stuck with this hardware. :(

I'm glad to hear that ximeta at least started to resume development for the later kernels. I have written kernel drivers, and I have to say that there were a lot of changes scheduled to be included in the 2.6.23 and later kernels (I hope my prior employer, has had fun updating the drivers I wrote...).

Ximeta and all of the other over protective companies should know that a binary module is still source code to a skilled programmer that knows machine code / assembly.

I too was foolish enough to buy two of the ximeta NDAS units thinking it would save me from setting up a server machine, but then I found out about how they were using non-standard proprietary drivers and that only one machine could have write access, because they are effectively exposing the drive at the raw ATA command level instead of a proper networked filesystem. My units have been collecting dust ever since. Only reason I came here today was to see if there was any possibility I could make use of them for a backup system i'm thinking of building.

At the time I purchased them I entertained the idea that someone could create alternative firmware, but ximeta even screwed that up, they told me they used ASIC's that could not be reprogrammed.

I have the skills, but i'm not motivated enough to spend any time looking at the code.

Well, Iguess I can stoplooking for a replacement ac adapter then.

Anybody have the driver yet for ubuntu/kubuntu 8.04.1? I just got this because of the "linux" support.

Replying to aingoppa: Apparently this does not work with Ubuntu Hardy Kernal 2.6.24-19-generic. The modules would install, but the ndasadmin still claims that the dependencies are not met ( satisfyable ). I do hope someone will fully develop a driver for this. Linux is becoming more widely used than in the past. If no driver is being supported, NDAS will surely go down the drain when the world of linux takes over.

Once again, linux compatibility lost with latest kernels (2.6.27) . no commits in the source since 5 months! write from more than one host promised from several years still not available...

Support realy sucks!!!

Don't purchase any ximeta based products if you're a linux or vista user or you'll regret it a lot!

Why there aren't any support for latest kernel?

I was planning to buy tomorrow an external HD from targa (NDAS Ximeta based) but as with other products I always check the web for direct linux kernel compatibility.

The way I see this subject (very open source unfriendly) it looks like I'll have to find other solution.

PS: it's a pity there is no coraid single HD enclosures since they have open source drivers in kernel aleready...

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