[HOW-TO] A how to guide for ARM & Intel NAS servers

[Don]

Over the past months I have been putting together a how-to guide for the TS-109, 209, 409, & 509 NAS units. I started to put this together after I received my first 209 and started playing with it. I learned a lot from the forums and the support people at QNAP. One of the things I noticed on the forums was that many people had the same learning pains, questions, and issues that I had so I decided to put this guide together. While this guide will definitely help the new user I hope that experienced users also pick up a thing or two from it. It is aimed at using and enhancing core functionality and not at installing / configuring other applications.

It does not address the TS-x01 models as I have no experience with them and do not have one to test with. If someone would like to send me updates for these models (or QNAP would like to send me a TS-101 or 201 that I could use for testing ) I would be happy to include them in a future update.

I want to thank Christian, fribse, and Silas for their contributions, review, and valuable feedback. I also want to thank all contributors on the forums because without your continued support in the QNAP community some of the information in the guide would not exist.

I hope that you find this useful. Please provide feedback if you see any errors or something that you think should be added. Of course a write-up with your request would be helpful.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Version 1.2 of the guide has been released on 10/16/09. I hope you find it as useful as the original version.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Version History:

V1.0

Initial release - downloaded 6531 times!!
V1.1

Not released
v1.2

Adds new content, addresses all the ARM and Intel models, and was reformatted

QNAP TS & SS ARM & Intel How-to Guide V1.2.zip

[KL643]

Thanx Don for your time and effort, will start reading tomorrow. Time to go for a sleep here...3.36AM. Hope to find some useful stuff

[stevebow]

Bl..dy h.ll, why didn't I have this when I first got my 409 Pro???

I've skipped through the doc for now, and at first glance looks very professional. I'll read it through fully later on, there's quite some reading!

Many thanks to Don and the other contributors mentioned in the doc, well done!

This really deserves a Sticky if I ever saw one.

[AndyChuo]

Great stuff, thanks for sharing Don.

Andy

[lifeisfun]

Thanks for your time doing this !

[Don]

Great stuff, thanks for sharing Don.

Andy

Thanks for your time doing this !

You are welcome. My way of giving back to the community and to QNAP.

[JD2k3]

Thank you for this guide

Just been quickly reading the guide but I found a little mistake on page 29:

When someone from the internet is attacking your router they most likely will be searching for the known ports, like
21 (FTP), 22 (Telnet), and 23 (SSH) in order to gain access to your system.

This should be: 21 (FTP), 22 (SSH) and 23 (Telnet)

[Don]

Thanks. I'll make the correction.

[bigkah624]

Thanks for the guide. You're awesome for doing this! I hope in the future, i can also contribute to the community.

[Don]

Thanks for the guide. You're awesome for doing this! I hope in the future, i can also contribute to the community.

You're welcome.

[paolo]

Nice work!! compliments also from me!

Paolo

[Q]

impressive thx!

[Mouse]

Had a quick flick through and I can learn a lot from this. Well done and Thank You.

[ESPNSTI]

Excellent guide, thanks!

In the "How to Increase Raid Rebuild/Expansion Speed" section, you had a disclaimer that you hadn't seen any reports of anyone trying it.
For that reason I want to give you my account.

I have a TS-509 with v2.1.0 Build 1202.
I had a RAID-5 array with four 1TB WD drives (WD1002FBYS-01A6B03.0), and I added a fifth using "Add Drive" on the "RAID Management Tool" page.
Before I started that process I shut off all services (multimedia station, download station, web server, rTorrent++, etc...).
I understand that you're supposed to be able to access the data while it's expanding, but I'm totally new to RAID and I was a bit apprehensive about it.
So I took the "better safe than sorry" approach and did not access the NAS RAID drive at all during the expansion process.

After about 12 hours of expanding it was at 3%, which put it on par to complete in 8 or 9 days.
I then found the article on how to speed it up.

I logged in with Putty and found that the speed limit min and max were set to the default values:

#cat /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max
# 200000
# cat /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min
# 1000

Using "cat /proc/mdstat", I saw that the expanding speed was right around 1 to 1.5MB per second.

I used "echo 10000 >/proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min" to up the speed to 10MB per second.
Looking at "cat /proc/mdstat" again, I saw that within a time span of about a minute or so, the speed gradually increased to about 10MB per second.

I then used "echo 25000 >/proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min" in an attempt to up the speed to 25MB per second.
However I never saw anything above a speed of about 11MB per second.
I'm not certain if it reached a limit of how fast it could go, or if it only responds to the first speed_limit_min change.

The CPU usage was about 8-10% and the HDD, CPU and System temperatures never increased.
The temps were between 27-30C (80-86F) for the HDD and System, and about 19C (66F) for the CPU.
The ambient temp probably was around 13C (55F). (I have my NAS in an equipment rack in the basement).

After about 38 hours the process completed successfully.
If I had immediately increased the speed_limit_min to 10MB per second, I think the total time would have been around 27 hours.

Below are the entries it made in the log.
Note that where is says "Rebuilding done" is the 50% mark on the "Device Configuration - SATA Disk" web page, so the last 50% only took about 1.5 hours.

2009-01-14 10:06:04 System 127.0.0.1 localhost [RAID5 Disk Volume: Drive 1 2 3 4 5] Expanding Raid Device completed.
2009-01-14 10:06:04 System 127.0.0.1 localhost [RAID5 Disk Volume: Drive 1 2 3 4 5] Expanding Raid Device completed. Drive 5 is added.
2009-01-14 08:32:49 System 127.0.0.1 localhost [RAID5 Disk Volume: Drive 1 2 3 4 5] Rebuilding done.
2009-01-12 20:17:35 System 127.0.0.1 localhost [RAID5 Disk Volume: Drive 1 2 3 4 5] Start rebuilding.
2009-01-12 20:17:31 System 127.0.0.1 localhost [RAID5 Disk Volume: Drive 1 2 3 4] Start to expand Raid Device: Add Drive 5.

[Don]

Thanks for the detailed response. I'm glad it worked. I'll remove the disclaimer from the next release.

Thanks again.
Don