A few days ago there was an earthquake where I live, and somehow a screwdriver fell onto my NAS that’s sitting on the ground. The NAS stopped working (as in, not able to navigate to the web interface), so I decided to power cycle it.
However, when I tried to boot it up, there’s no longer a beep, and it’s now a brick…
I tried doing some research, and at first I thought it’s the LPC clock, but it seems like everyone who run into LPC clock issue have all four red lights turned on. So, I’m not sure this is the same issue.
Here’s it from another angle:
You can see that it’s only LED5 and LED6 that lit up red, unlike other reports of LPC clock issue.
I’ve opened a support ticket with QNAP, but I felt like I should also ask it here in case anyone knows what these lights mean.
On the side note: I’m in a double whammy state because when I plug these drives into a new TS-253E, thinking I could just migrate to it, it turns out that my volume password no longer work. I have two volumes on it, sharing the same password, and I can unlock the smaller volume just fine. That’s why I felt like I need to resurrect the unit if I can, with the hope that the password is saved in the unit somewhere and it’ll automatically unlock my drive when I put it back…
With that, if you know what does these two lights means, or where the QTS actually stores the password to automatically unlock the volumes, please let me know. Thank you for reading.
The NAS was open like that, when the screwdriver fell into it?
Passwords are saved on the disks, so you might have to rely on your backups if you cannot decrypt that disks
Nope, it fell onto the top of the fully assembled NAS. I just opened it like this afterward trying to figure out what’s going on.
I felt like the impact from the top might not be the cause, but I really couldn’t think of anything else that could cause it, as the NAS is always on an online UPS and there wasn’t really anything else that would have caused it to stop working.
Unless it’s a VERY heavy screwdriver, I wouldn’t think the NAS could be that severely damaged by it … freak accident. (the disks … yes)
If both volumes use the same password I don’t see why the other one would not unlock, as the password question was ignored, I guess there was none ?
I do have backup, but only for important files and not the full volume, so right now I guess I’m trying to see if I can recover the rest, since it would be nice not having to build the collection from zero again …
But yes, really weird that it failed like that, and I was even more surprise to see that the drives were (kind of) fine …
I do understand that the password is save on the disk (i.e., it being a key to encrypt the disk), but what I’m curious is that when you configured the QTS to auto-unlock the volumes, those passwords has to go somewhere outside the volumes themselves. So, I just want to know if anyone knows where that “somewhere” is, since if it’s stored on the flash memory daughterboard (which is where the firmware is), then I can attempt to find another working TS-251+ and swap the flash memory from this device to it.
Everything is on the disks, including the OS (that’s why you can move the disks over)
The NAS itself only contains a setup bootstrapper.
1 Like
I was reading the manual for QTS 4.2,which state it clearly about encryption and saving the key to nas:
- Saving the key on the NAS will protect you only if your hard drives are stolen. However, there is a risk of data breach if the entire NAS is stolen as the data is accessible after restarting the NAS.
- If you do not save the encryption key on the NAS, your NAS will be protected against data breach even if the entire NAS were stolen. The disadvantage is that you have to unlock the disk volume manually on each system restart.
I think it should still applies to QTS 5, but it’s more clear on what the encryption keys do. (QTS 5 doc)
So, this made it sound like the key is on the NAS itself if I pick “Auto unlock on startup”, since the disk won’t work if someone take it and plug it into their QTS NAS without knowing the password. I don’t think it makes sense that the key would be with the drive.
Also, if the encryption key/password is with the drive, then it should auto unlock as soon as I plug it into my new NAS, because I picked “Auto unlock on startup” option.
Anyway, thank you so much for looking into this with me.
It’s ‘on the NAS’ as the disks are in the NAS as well.
It’s a very insecure way to do it as the encryption password is not deleted when the admin password is reset, so auto-unlock on a stolen unit could easily expose all your data.
I got a reply from QNAP support team to swap the DOM flash memory to the new device and then boot it up. And surprise, it did boot up with my drives unlocked.
So yes, while the support person wasn’t allowed to say where the password was stored, swapping the DOM flash memory to the new device will unlock the volumes that were encrypted and “Auto unlock on startup” is checked.
Still, now I need to move the data out of this volume and recreate it. I felt like I got so lucky this time…
I mean if you swapped the DOM with a new one…the password couldn’t have been on the DOM
It’s not a new DOM. It’s the DOM from my dead TS-251+.
So my migration path was to move both hard drives and the DOM to the new NAS, then the volumes would automatically unlocked.
HDD + Using new DOM that shipped with TS-253E = volumes remained locked.
HDD + Putting DOM from TS-251+ into TS-253E = volumes are unlocked.
Basically, the volume passwords were saved in the DOM, not in the hard drives.
Make sure you do a diskless update to your DOM though…if you ever need to start the NAS from scratch, the DOM has the wrong base image on it.
