Server Rack Pet-Project: NAS

After mounting and finally managing to have a UPS working, I can guarantee that a NAS will “always” be powered on without disrupting the data availability…

I started in a very naive way by plugging my HDD into the Pi, then one of the two almost broke and I had to run take shelter and buy a real NAS.

I bought every cheap NAS (therefore old one): Netgear RND2000v1 (ReadyNAS Duo v1). It has only 2 bays, so just RAID 1 is supported. Sorry, but RAID 0 is for fools.

2 bays, for now, are all I can afford 🙁 I wanted to do RAID 5, but all I can do is RAID 1.

I didn’t trust buying second-hand disks, so I bought them brand new.

I read some reviews about not being brand new… but I guess I got lucky because they are sealed… (does it count? am I that naive?)
On the label, it reports the manufacture date, which is November 2021, so I guess they are brand new after all.

… then I discovered this. Yes, I am a newbie.

This NAS is cool and has 2 USB ports and a scheduled jobs panel which allows copying data periodically from/to externals disks.

This NAS is very old and despite using HTTPS is only supports TLS 1.0 and Chrome dislikes it very much to the point it doesn’t let me browse it, fortunately, Firefox is a little bit more flexible on that and lets you override the setting.

But then I need to figure out how to reset it, I tried a few things without luck. So I tried to hack it a couple of times (first to figure out the IP address because it was on another class and then to find the default password).

I thought I could upgrade the firmware, unfortunately, this model is not the v2 which runs on ARM, it is the v1 which runs on SPARC. So, no way I can upgrade it because it is so old that they don’t bother maintaining anymore (rightfully so).

After a few hours of copying the data from my old disks, I filled the 1TB space I had.

I had to spend 3/4 days going through the data, using fdupes to remove duplicates, splitting the folders into segments to speed up the process as the NAS is not so fast and scan 1TB was very slow.

Then I started to manually merge similar folders, what a task!

My laptop was on day and night copying data from one disk to another, at some point it was so hot at the touch that I had to plug that extra cooler to bring the temperature down. It was 49°C, I guess inside it was “boiling” hot…

After a week of cleaning over and over, I managed to de-duplicate most of the data and trash over 500 GB. So, now I have a clean nice folder structure.

root@routing:/mnt/nfs# tree -dL 2
.
├── Personal
│   ├── Audios
│   ├── Bank
│   ├── CarInsurance
│   ├── Education
│   ├── Expat
│   ├── Finances
│   ├── Healthcare
│   ├── House
│   ├── ID
│   ├── Images
│   ├── Learning
│   ├── Mortgage
│   ├── Passwords
│   ├── Pictures
│   ├── Projects
│   ├── Rent
│   ├── Subscriptions
│   ├── UtilityBills
│   ├── Videos
│   └── Wedding
├── REVIEW
│   ├── Mixed
│   ├── Pictures
│   └── Video
├── SystemConfiguration
└── Work
    ├── Certifications
    ├── Companies
    ├── Contracts
    ├── Interviews
    ├── Invoices
    ├── Membership
    ├── Mentorships
    ├── Projects
    ├── Resume
    ├── Taxes
    └── Training

In the next post I’ll cover about how to maintain this NAS secure by adding a firewall to the mix. Stay tuned.