Switched to a new admin account and can no longer access my NAS

[robonas]

Hi all, some help needed.

I have a QNAP TS-453D, running the latest version of QTS.

As per QNAP's recommendation displayed in the list of notifications in the top right corner, today I decided to replace the default admin account with a custom admin account for added security. So I created a new user, gave all the permissions my admin account had, then logged out from admin, and logged in to "admin2". Once in admin2, I also enable 2FA like I had with admin, disabled admin (otherwise the whole exercise would be pointless), and was just setting up my home page to display the same shortcuts I had previously. 15- 20 mins into my session with admin2, I got a warning that a the NAS Server was taking too long to respond, and just like that it threw me out, and I could no longer access my QNAP from my browser.

I tried finding my NAS with Qfinder with no success either.
From my router settings, I can still see my NAS's dedicated IP as Online however pinging it from cmd gives a timeout also.
One final thing, I did have a mapped drive on my windows 11 to the NAS folder, and it seems like the timeout issue was triggered when I was navigating out of this folder. I understand that once I disabled the admin account, I would have needed to relogin (or worse case remap) the mapped drive on Windows, but I cannot understand why I can no longer access or find the QNAP on my network.

Any ideas, suggestions on how I can fix this please? I have beginner to medium knowledge with networks, ie I can follow a set of instructions if needed.

[FSC830]

Is your NAS in any way exposed to internet?
This means access FROM internet to your NAS, not access from NAS TO internet!
If not, there is no need to disable the admin account.

If Qfinder does not find the NAS most likely a network setting changed, for what reason ever.
You can also try a 3s reset to set network settings to default. A 3s reset enables the admin, set password back to default, disables 2FA and set IP to DHCP.

Regards

[robonas]

Thank you for your quick reply. No my NAS is not exposed to the internet.

Thank you for suggesting the 3s reset I am now able to connect reliably to my NAS on my home network as before.

In the mean time I had been trying a number of things, and what I think was the issue was the following: (however I am not keen to retry in the correct order so will probably never know for sure).

When I did the following steps:
set up admin2,
disabled admin
tried to remap network drives from Windows < This step was triggering a timeout on the overall server.

I managed to access by disconnecting NAS, rebooting, reconnecting. However, after a few minutes that I manage to log in, I was still getting the same timeout on the server.
My suspicion is that Windows or some other process was still trying to use the disabled admin user triggering same timeout again.

Probably the good order for switching an account would have been to thoroughly make sure all usage of that account was disabled before disabling.

Now everything is working well. Thank you