Iomega Storcenter ix2 – the update hack.

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storcenter ix2I’m posting this basically because I know others are out there on your own. Cold and wandering through the internets looking for something about how to mod and update this device. I’m talking about the (EMC) Iomega Storecenter ix2. I picked up this little guy a little more then a year ago for some cheap money. Then I found out that they were discontinuing the model because of some pretty obvious problems. :|

Pretty obvious problem #1. The fan is horrible and you probably have already done something about it. Along with the fan the airflow through the device is just as bad. You can see that Iomega took a complete 180 when they came out with “the new model“** What I suggest is you get out your Dremel and cut a nice hole in the back panel. I put an over-sized ultra quiet fan with a dust filter on it. It’s already back in the closet, so I’m not getting a picture of it… Hell, you don’t want to see a picture of it. It’s a 80mm PC fan bolted to the back of a $200 NAS drive. It’s goofy looking utilitarian hardware that needs to be in the closet. Let the sexy laptops and iPods take the credit while the hacked Linux device with wires and fans all over it gets the job done. *cough **For reasons of ‘search’ the next model up is the ‘eye ex two hundred’

Problemo #2. I have been looking for a USB aware UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for this device from day one. Having a ‘self aware’ storage device is pretty cool. Enable write caching and don’t worry when the power goes out when your in Tahiti. I finally obtained a Tripp Lite UPS and replaced the battery on it. Fresh USB cable plugged in and – nothing. Then it gets worse. I restart the device and it just hangs. So – Are you having a problem where your Storcenter ix2 won’t recognize your Uninterruptible Power Supply?

Final Problem #3. Every time you try to search for Iomega Storcenter ix2 (or maybe storecenter?) you get a thousand ‘re-view’s’ of how awesome it is and nothing about helping you solve issues or fix problems. Even after you use a crazy Google search like this…

I’m here to help!
Not with the fan though – you’re clever, you’ll come up with something. :p

Iomega Link to all the files and info for the Storcenter ix2

Good news / Bad news. You hit ‘update’ and your device tells you that you have the latest firmware! You don’t. The latest firmware would be 2.0.15.43099 or higher. The good news is that along with potentially fixing the UPS not recognized problem, you will get the torrent downloader. This means that while your desktop is off and not using 500watts an hour your little ix2 can stay busy getting ‘the latest release of Fedora’***.
***or movies and pr0n.

Other bad news is you’re going to have to sign up to the Iomega site with an email. It’s not nearly as bad as Cisco is – but you have to get a valid email. Or an alias that forwards to your real email that you can shut down after you hit accept.

While your doing that – Might as well sign up for the Iomega Support Forums Lots of moderated fun in there… :)

Backup your data. Hack the fan. Load the firmware file and hit update. Wait a while in a panic. Login. Connect your UPS. Hopefully it now recognizes it! Torrent movies and pr0n. Set quotas. Oh – and because it can’t possibly all be good. You will lose the ability to get email updates from the unit… This is a gem – exhange?? :confused:

Update – I got SSH access! Easy as HTML. Here’s how you get SSH access to your ix2. Now to FIX the email notification port and configuration… Initial look tells me that it doesn’t use sendmail :(

16 thoughts on “Iomega Storcenter ix2 – the update hack.”

  1. I just bought an ix2 (no -100 or anything), and installed 2.0.15.43099. But I can’t see anywhere to allow ssh access. I can allow ftp, nfs, CIFS etc, but no sign of SSH. Where did you find it? I don’t want to remove the disks and put them in another computer to update the configuration.

  2. Log in to your ix2.
    In your browser replace the html file at the end of the IP address with ‘support.html’
    Example: http://10.0.1.5/support.html
    There is a icon called Support Access.
    Select this link and click SSH access check box.
    Login as root, and the SSH password for your box is: soho[youradminpassword]
    That’s ‘soho’ with your current admin password tacked onto the end without brackets.

    Drive it around like a truck!
    – Kris

  3. I don’t know if this is of interest on the ix2. I’ve had mine about 18 months when I experienced the ‘blinking blue light’ behavior. When this happens, you can no longer reset or turn off the unit with the power button – just unplug it!! Took me a while to remove the drives and verify they were good – removed them, bought a THERMALTAKE unit and loaded Ext2 IFS for Windows (http://www.fs-driver.org/)to read the drives and move the data to another backup.

    The problem I’ve had with Iomega is their accepting the design of the ix2 (predecessor of the ix2-200) is flawed. I believe the control board and components are substandard and are prone to failure perhaps from overheating, perhaps substandard construction and parts, perhaps from poor circuit design or all the above. I also believe this is why they chose to discontinue it and build the ix2-200. I offered to pay a delta for an ix2-200 but was told they would only provide a refurbished ix2. I hate thinking of the refurbished unit as a ticking time bomb but I think it is exactly that and within another 18 months I will be removing the drives and plugging them in to the Thermaltake unit to move the data onto another backup drive. Kind of defeats the purpose of NAS in the first place. Anyone else have this experience?

  4. Not sure if this is true but I recently found out that when the twonky server on the Iomega ix2 200 cloud edition has the auto scan enabled to detect new devices it end up killing you entire home network. I have a comcast subscription and i get 25-30 Mbps but when this auto scan is enabled on the twonky server, the speed dropped down to 0.7Mbps. I was looking around why this was happening for a long time and then i just tried a few things on my iomega and this twonky server auto scan thing workaround fixed my problem. However, now I have to add mac addresses of my devices on the network everytime the iomega device powercycles

  5. From iomega’s suppor:
    ”
    Version 2.0.18.23122 – Release date 07/12/2012
    Iomega strongly recommends all customers download the update file and review the included ReadMe. This update will change some of the default behaviors on your device.

    Fixes Remote Access vulnerability and an issue with secure SSL certificates
    ”
    Does it mean that the “soho+password” ssh access trick will not work anymore?

    Thanks!

  6. That update fixes the “cloud” – if your Iomega was default shared to the internet there was an SSL cert vulnerability (not SSH) that attackers might be able to use to access your data remotely. Your Mileage May Vary… – Kris

  7. Hi
    I have rebuilt an IX2 (Both drives failed) and have it up and running with firmware 2.0.18.23122. I know there are updates to this but when I download from Lenovo (latest is version 4.x.x.x.x) it says I need version 3.1.x.x.x. and I can not find this on their site.

    Anybody have any links to any firmware after 2.0.18.23122?

    Paul

  8. Kris,

    I have a weird issue with ix2 NAS, the NAS shares appears to be empty, but when I SSH and check all the content its still there not sure how to fix it, iomega support helpless(even after 3months of hold no resolution to it).

    Probably i can copy all the content to external device and reset, but copying 3TB content is a huge task, any tips before i attempt this?

    -Madhu

    1. I’m going to assume you restarted a few times. I’d look at the SAMBA config. See if there is anything weird there, or if you messed with it previously.

      I have since moved onto a Synology Disk Station. One of the nice things about having shell access on both machines, was that I was able to connect them together via NFS and just copy all the files over with Linux. Forget Windows drag and drop. If you use screen you can disconnect from the terminal and log off your workstation. No need to watch 3TB of data copy across the network.

      Now that I’ve migrated to new hardware – I’m wiping the data off my old ix2 as we speak.

      Good Luck!
      – Kris

  9. Anyone with a working ix2 (not -200), is the fan always powered when the unit is on? My fan runs for 0.5 seconds after power-on and then stops– when unit gets hot, fan doesn’t seem to start itself. Measured power at the fan connector, can see the same– definitely not a fan issue; not sure if there’s a thermal switch somewhere responsible for enabling the fan during runtime, or if my unit has become defective. Thanks!

  12. Hi

    I’m just trying to get the UPS notification functionality working, to let me know of power outages – anyone got any idea on this? Can’t find anything in the dashboard or settings under “power” section or anywhere else for that matter?

    Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d
    2.1.38.22294

  13. I’ve had my IX2 for over 2 years now and i love it. I’ve had other NAS devices and i have to say for the price this one blows away all others. I tried drobo, synology and a ton of others and frankly they were way way over priced. This little NAS has been great for me. I did setup my firewall to prevent it from contacting home because it was suspicious to me that it tried reach two locations which neither Lenovo or Iomega would ever explain. (I could understand checking the update site but there was other traffic it was sending to some other location which Iomega refused to tell me what it was.
    Anyways, I really have been happy with this device and have recommended it to all of my friends. No where that i know of can you get a device that does all this does for the price.

  15. I realise this is an old post now, so maybe you won’t be interested anymore (do you even still own the ix2-200?)

    Anyway, I thought I’d share my experience of this device. I bought mine back in 2012 with aspirations of making it into a network media centre.

    I can tell you that those plans were well and truly abandoned. My experience is that the ix2-200 is nowhere near fast enough for streaming of modern media. Hardly surprising when you read the specs on it, but I guess I was naive about it back then. I just bought the device assuming I could use it for what I had in mind, without checking anything! I guess modern NAS devices would be quite a bit better at this sort of thing.

    I ran into a bunch of trouble with mine over the years. First of all, the hard drive power down function simply does not work. I can set it to power them down with any period I like, and it accepts the setting (even reports it as such in the logs) but it never powers them down. They are always on, full time, and it gets HOT inside there. Fine if the system had adequate cooling, but it doesn’t.

    The most annoying thing, though, is I could never get mine to work with DHCP. It would always fail to assign itself an IP, and then it would assign itself a *random* ip, out of 65,536 possibilities. How are you supposed to fix the situation? Well, you need to know which ip it assigned itself. How are you supposed to know that? Who knows! Guess, I suppose!

    In the end I hacked an RS232 link onto mine, and I was able to gain console access to it with this method. Now whenever I get into this trouble I can ask it what IP it assigned itself over RS232, or even change the ip to something more sensible.

    http://brianhoskins.uk/hardware-hacking-the-iomega-storcenter-ix2-200/

    Overall, not to impressed with the ix2-200. I would pay a lot more attention to what I was buying in future!

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