Qnap on Wingate365

Photo Station QNAP

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 11:06:00 +0000

If after trying the in-built photo web service for a bit you give up on it. Which is inevitable as its terribly slow, using normal home broadband in any case. It can be a pain to then remove all the thumbs clogging up your photo archive. But this can be done simply via SSH just move all the contents of the .@__thumb folders created to a single folder, check your not deleting anything you dont want to then wax the lot.

Mount SMB in QNAP

Sat, 09 Nov 2013 14:16:00 +0000

# mount.cifs //Server/Share /mnt/win7/test -o username=xxx,password=xxx

This command will mount the folder ‘Share’ hosted on ‘Server’ into the nix folder /mnt/win7/test

Network locations are case sensitive!

Thanks father_mande

QNAP Online RAID 5 Migration

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:48:00 +0000

Recently added two new physical drives into a QNAP NAS (TS-419P II) and performed online migration of the existing single drive to a 3 drive RAID 5 setup, here is how I got on.

I shut down the NAS, although I later read this is unnecessary and the drives can be hot swapped, selected the previous drive from the list in RAID management in the admin pages. Clicked the MIGRATE button, selected the two new drives and chose RAID 5. Full documentation here.

The system warns that all services will be shut down and shows a % progress for the migration. This took about 12 hrs to get to 49% where it got stuck and without intervention aborted the migration and reverted back to the single drive setup.

Second try, after googling my problem, this time I manually disabled all of the QPKG applications through the admin pages. Again took about 12 hrs to get to 49% where it stuck for a few hrs. Further reading on the forums mentions mySQL and JAVA as being two particular packages that might need a manual kill (SSH in and use the kill -9 command).

After Java was stopped the progress updated to 50% and the screen displayed the 3 drives as a RAID 5 array, the remainder of the migration took another 12 hrs to complete. Here is the item in the RAID management table.

Cloud Backup on QNAP NAS

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:26:00 +0000

After finding Symform a bit too slow for my needs I decided to move to Amazon S3 to give them a go and also to try out some more simple scripting.

QNAP does have a web interface for backing up to S3, but it is a bit buggy and did not work for me. Looking in the forums people complain of issues with files that are too big or trying to copy too many files. Anyhow this is where s3cmd comes in.

Written in python s3cmd is a command line tool that can be used to upload / sync files to S3.

Installing this tool on a QNAP is covered by

http://bit.ly/Zuuhou summarised by natebeaty, http://bit.ly/Z2Lzch

1. Install Python from the QNAP admin QPKG Center

2. Download latest s3cmd and transfer to a QNAP share directory

3. SSH in to your QNAP box

4. python s3cmd --configure

5. write shell scripts, add to crontab, etc

The original guide mentions that the config file is deleted on reboot, so need to check that out

scrip file; with your backup its important to know the system is working and your files are being backed up. So a log file is essential, and why not have this notified by email as well. all this can be achieved with scripts.

Home and Cloud Storage

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 19:12:00 +0000

With the recent death of an HHD in my space PC I decided it was time to sort out my home storage of irreplaceable data (photos and documents) and my home media setup.

Old Setup

Storage: An old Windows box, 2x200GB HHD, Cloud Backup via Mozy, wired to ethernet
Media Player: XBMC running on an XBOX, wired to ethernet, SCART to old TV
Music Player: Old windows netbook, sitting on top of the amp; WiFi to ethernet, wired to amp

The older of the two disks gave out on the windows box and I lost a pile of downloaded media plus many old digital photos. The photos at least were recoverable from Mozy, best ~£50 quid I spent that year.

New Setup

Storage: QNAP TS-419P, 1x3TB HHD, Cloud Backup via Symform
Media Player: Twonky Media Server. Wired to ethernet. New TV (Samsung SMART) also wired to the ethernet via a gigabit switch.
Music Player: Same as before

QNAP is a network attached storage device (NAS) it's basically a box with space for 4 HHDs and a linux operating system to run everything. I will add 3 more drives in due course, when I need the space, also by staggering the purchase/installation disks they wont all fall out of warranty at the same time.

I no longer needed the old XBOX/XMBC as the video (and photos) now streams directly from the NAS over the ethernet to the TV via the DLNA service Twonky Media Server. While this was not pre-loaded on the QNAP it was a simple click of a button to install it from the QNAP web admin pages. The XBMC file browser is more flexible than Samsung's interface on the TV and with Twonky you lose the ability to 'mark' a file watched or resume from where you stopped, but its small price to pay.

Local Storage Redundancy

I plan to use the following RAID set-up as I fill up the NAS box

1x3TB: RAID 0, Available Storage 3TB, Fault Tolerance: None [current setup]
2x3TB: RAID 1, Available Storage 3TB, Fault Tolerance: 1 disk
3x3TB: RAID 5, Available Storage 6TB, Fault Tolerance: 1 disk
4x3TB: RAID 5, Available Storage 9TB, Fault Tolerance: 1 disk

I am (and plan to continue) using WD RED drives designed for NAS devices.

Once I get the second drive installed (in a ~years time) I will also have local redundancy on all the data which means I will only have to reply on the cloud backup if there is a biblical level disaster (fire/ flood/ locusts/ angel of death etc) and all the disks in the NAS die at once.

Cloud Backup

I decided to move away from Mozy, mainly because it's not supported by QNAP! these were my alternatives; Amazon S3, ElephantDrive and Symform.

Of these I chose Symform; they offers unlimited free cloud storage if you contribute spare empty space from your system (at a ratio of 'your data : contributed space' = 1:2). On the flip side its only a simple data mirror, no versioning or backup sets; but for my needs this is just fine.

The upload over my ADSL connection is a bit on the slow side, but it's getting there and soon my ~100Gb of photos and docs will be safely mirrored. To get the 100Gb for free I had to 'give up' 200Gb of space ~ 7% of my 3TB drive, not a bad trade.

QPKG (QNAP apps)

As QNAP is running on an Open Source OS there is a wide range of free applications that it can run/host; transmission, wordpress, FTP, SSH, webserver, VPN, LDAP, syslog, iTunes server, mySQL to name but a few. It comes pre-loaded with all the basics and though the web admin interface you can install more. Even more than that if you are prepared to SSH in and use an 'apt-get' type application named ipkg (currently 1329 packages listed).

Other Handy Apps

There are a variety of handy iOS apps that I use to control the media at home.

Twonky Beam; this allows me to browse my NAS folders and choose what file to play on the TV, it also allows browsing on the web for any videos (eg youtube etc) and 'beams' them onto the telly. Very neat.
Wmote: remote control for Winamp; which is running on the netbook
Remoteless: remote control for Spotify; also running on the netbook, for those times when mine own music collection is lacking (I think I stopped acquiring mp3's when I left university)
Airfoil; cross platform app that allows the audio output on an iOS device to be broadcast to another device (windows/mac), in this case to the netbook running Airfoil speakers; this lets me for example listed to BBC radio from the iPlayer app on the iPad and have the sound coming out of the main speakers.

On top of these I also use :

Teamviewer for remote desktop connection to the PCs in the house
FileExplore which as the name suggests allows simle file browsing and moving etc from the iPhone/iPadAnd last but not least
iSSH which is an iOS SSH terminal, which I use for basic system admin on the QNAP.