A NAS-ty Problem

So, I was moving some bits of tech around on Sunday, tidying up leads and replugging network cables in preparation for – some time soon – the passing of control for DNS and everything from my old router to my new Mesh Network controllers.

Only one thing didn’t go as planned, I accidentally pulled out the power lead going into my NAS.

Yes, I have backups, but a couple of days old.

But I was not too concerned – this NAS has proved to be terribly resilient, and it soon powered up again. But then I ran into problems.

Two of the four disks run as a RAID1 device, and in setting it up at the start, I decided to encrypt the volume. There was some good reason – the network stuff used to live in my hallway, and I was thinking of the dangers of someone lifting a disk out of the rack. However, this does mean after every power up, I have to mount the volume again with a password.

And this was the problem. The web interface of the NAS had recently changed, and I could no longer find the dialog that let me mount a passworded encrypted volume.

After titting around a bit, I discovered that if I rebooted it, it came up with a mount wizard. But that only let me choose which volume to mount (and my volume was there!). But there was no-where to type in a password, so – predicatably – the mount failed.

(I later viewed the source of this page, and saw there was a DIV containing password entry, but set to display:none. Thanks, guys.)

I logged a call to Terra-Master support yesterday, and today someone took over my spare laptop. They’d offered to do it yesterday, but at 2am, and I wasn’t letting anyone access my network while I was in bed.

A summary of the support call:

○ “The new TOS no longer supports encrypted volumes” is obviously false, it is merely that the web interface does not provide a way to mount them. The fact that the techie was able to telnet into the device and mount the drive says it all.

○ Just mounting the drive was not the solution, as I would have the same problem at the next power-off. So we would need to reconfigure, which meant backing up the newly mounted drive. He proposed we switched back to the old version that worked. I replied “But won’t it try to upgrade itself again?” Duh.

○ Telling the guy that there was no need to back up the media files (which are in a separate folder, change seldom, and I have two existing backups of) resulted him in telling the system to back up everything. “It won’t take long”.

○ This led to him asking me if I thought all my files had backed up *every* time the scrolling command line screen paused for a particularly large video file. “This is taking a long time”. “Yes, it is a 1.8Tb volume.”

○ In the end, I explained that I could see the volume was mounted, and yes I understood that was temporary; but I could probably take it from here. That way I could back up the stuff that actually needed backing up, and not worry that he was going to think “It’s stopped – ok, that’s it”. Someone later pointed out that he was probably cursing me for robbing him of his solitaire-playing time.

I’ve decided that volume encryption is more trouble for me than it is worth. Especially as the NAS now is in a more secure place, behind the sofa. Security by obscurity, and Parker Knoll.

So after the backup is complete, I’ll scrap the volume and start again. But I am still not impressed with a new release that shipwrecks installations that were valid under the old one.