This page tries to list the current (at the time of this writing) limitations of support for the Thecus N2100 after a fresh Debian installation.

Known Hardware Support Problems

• Fan is running full speed all the time; see also the I2C section in Thecus N2100 Internals; this is because the automatic mode is impractical to use on this hardware; also, it seems that even at full fan speed, the temperature is rather too hot
• No beep; see also the I2C section in Thecus N2100 Internals
• Does not shutdown; see also the I2C section in Thecus N2100 Internals
• 1 GB DDR is probably not supported; 512 MB PC3200 DDR works

Problems of the fan driver

• Needs some cleanup
• The driver could support all the operating modes, even if in this system they are not practical
• My Thecus n2100 actually runs pretty cool, 37 degress celcius with two 500GB drives. Fan runs all the time, and I just bought a new fan that will hopefully be quieter, the Evercool 40mm Case Fan

Problems of the rtc driver

• Could support the alarm features
• Could support kicking the rtc to running after battery is dead

Non-issues

• A "rtc0" device is created under /dev, and no "rtc" device; this seems to confuse hwclock, but a rtc -> rtc0 symlink seems enough to fix it; this might be an udev issue, but the rtc framework is rather young and it seems the "rtc0" name is correct, "/dev/rtc" will be phased out.
• Not a Thecus problem per se, but for reference, the sshfs fuse package does not work on the Thecus due to a bug in the code. From what I've gathered, it is known to the developers and is being fixed.

Other Open Issues

• Neither the official (Thecus) nor the d-i (Debian) firmware will set an IP address to RedBoot?; if you want to access the RedBoot? bootloader, you have to solder a serial port on the back of the SATA backplane; Kenneth Fyfe has written a parser for the RedBoot config data which can currently parse, partially validate, and print your RedBoot configuration; this config data may be fetched and updated via one of the ThecusN2100Mtds. Thecus will probably set this IP address in future firmware releases.
• /proc/cpu/alignment isn't set, which can cause bad behavior of buggy programs; the kernel can automatically fix these errors, simply set /proc/cpu/aligment to 3 for "warn" and "fixup"; more info at http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Info/Alignment; Debian bug http://bugs.debian.org/397616;(approve sites) to achieve this, add to /etc/init.d/procps.sh: