jamezpolley.com

I just bought myself a QNAP TS-409 Pro from Sky­comp. Very happy with both the device and Sky­comp so far.

How­ever, the ini­tial setup was a struggle.

The device has a very lim­ited openwrt-style firmware. Very, very lim­ited: it con­tains the bare min­i­mum func­tion­al­ity to be able to boot­strap the device with a more capa­ble OS once you have disks installed.

The doc­u­mented way of doing this is via a “Quick­In­stall Wiz­ard”, that comes on a pro­vided CD in Mac and Win­dows fla­vors. I only have Macs on my home net­work, so the win­dows fla­vor wasn’t use­able for me. The Mac fla­vor is… inter­est­ing. I ran into the prob­lem described here: In short, the full firmware isn’t pushed until after the dri­ves are ini­ti­ated; but the Wiz­ard gets stuck at the “Ini­tial­iz­ing dri­ves” stage, so the full firmware is never pushed.

I got around it using these instruc­tions — they’re described as being “For linux”, but as it just uses basic tools like tel­net and ftpd, it will work on any *nix.

Some notes:

• Obvi­ously, had to enable file shar­ing via FTP on my mac first. Did this under “Shar­ing” pref­pane, “File Shar­ing”, “Share files and fold­ers using FTP”. As the warn­ing states, this involves trans­mit­ting your user­name and pass­word in clear­t­ext: only enable this if you’re con­fi­dent you’ll only be trans­mit­ting them across a safe net­work. Bet­ter, use a username/password you cre­ated just for this pur­pose; which has no spe­cial priv­i­leges, and which will be turned off as soon as you’re done.
• Out of the box, the device lis­tens for tel­net con­nec­tions on port 13131. User­name and pass­word are “admin”.
• Once you’ve suc­cess­fully updated the fir­mare and rebooted, you won’t find a tel­netd on 13131 any more. THIS IS NOT AN ERROR, DON’T PANIC. Instead, you’ll find an sshd lis­ten­ing on port 22.
• You’ll also find a web inter­face lis­ten­ing on port 8080. If you visit that, you can start the process of set­ting up the device.
• It may be help­ful to have let the wiz­ard run at least to the “Ini­tial­iz­ing dri­ves” stage at least once. After I thought I knew what I was doing I switched to a new set of disks and tried again; and this time the hard dri­ves weren’t mounted at all, so I couldn’t go through the doc­u­mented process.

It’s not clear from the doc­u­men­ta­tion, but the device cre­ates a RAID-1 seg­ment 500Mb in size on each disk you insert (/dev/md9 in my case), and mounts this on /mnt/HDA_ROOT. This is where con­figs for the device, pack­ages you install, and so on are stored.

The device can han­dle mul­ti­ple raid­sets — although with only 4 disks to play with, you’re not likely to end up with >2 sets. In my cause I cur­rently have 3 1Tb dri­ves in a RAID-5 set, and a sin­gle 500Gb disk sit­ting on its own.