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QNAP is a company that designs great network attached storages (NAS). Unfortunately, even their NAS can crash. Mine did. Before you get to how to recover the lost data, here's my NAS and RAID spec (so that you can understand what and why I did):

QNAP TS-410U
RAID5
4 HDD (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd)
Approximately 1.4 TB of data
Fortunately I had the most important data already backuped somewhere else (less pressure and stresses during fixing)

And this is what happened to it:

NAS software update (for 1 week everything was working fine)
NAS rejected one of my HDDs (/dev/sda) due to SMART status.
RAID5 is now in degradation mode.
Broken HDD has been removed (not replaced!).
NAS has been shutdown (I didn't plan to use it so I turn it off for 2 weeks - just in case).
NAS would not boot with HDDs inside (well it would boot but it didn't get an IP address, so that I could get to it).
NAS is not reachable at all (despite the fact that it seemed to work just fine).
Basic system reset (3s) didn't help at all (still no network connection).

Booting without any hard drives

You won't be able to do anything, unless you manage to get online with your QNAP. If it's just a software issue (which was in my case), follow these instructions:

Force shutdown of your NAS (press power button for 10 seconds)
Remove all the hard drives
Turn on your NAS by pressing power button
Once it is ready (it beeps), perform a basic system reset
Restart your NAS (either by performing shutdown or by disconnecting power)
Boot it again
You should be able to reach the following website: http://your-nas-ip-address:8080/
Unfortunately you don't have any hard drives connected, so no data recovery yet ;)

No hard drives and no setup equals no way to recover data

Before you attach our hard drives and restore RAID, you need to know one thing: QNAP that is not a setup with at least 1 HDD, won't provide you with any tools like scp or rsync. You will be able to examine your HDDs (there's mdadm luckily), but you won't transfer your data via LAN. All network tools are only available once you perform a full setup. Also keep in mind, that you should perform a whole new installation with your RAID hard drives unplugged (just in case).

Spare HDD to the rescue

Make your NAS available via SSH with all the tools you need.
To do this, you will have to have one spare hard drive (any SATA HDD will be ok). Now:

Turn off your NAS.
Plug in your HDD.
Make sure your RAID HDDs are unplugged.
Power on your NAS.
Once it boots, go to admin page and perform a quick setup.
Now you should be able to connect to it via SSH (ssh admin@your-nas-ip) user: admin, password: admin
Once you connect, check if you have the following commands available: rsync, scp, mdadm

Reassembling RAID5 and mounting it to recover data

I used the first HDD slot for a temporary "rescue" HDD (/dev/sda). So it won't be included when I will reassemble the rest of HDDs.

Before you assemble anything, you need to check if there's valid RAID data on each of the remaining HDDs:

# You will have also 
mdadm --examine /dev/sdb3
mdadm --examine /dev/sdc3
mdadm --examine /dev/sdd3

For each of them, you should see something like that:

/dev/sdc3:
          Magic : a92b4efc
        Version : 00.90.00
           UUID : 0fcde09f:5258ded4:4c22c8ef:89a53221
  Creation Time : Sat Mar  9 21:13:27 2013
     Raid Level : raid5
  Used Dev Size : 1951945600 (1861.52 GiB 1998.79 GB)
     Array Size : 5855836800 (5584.56 GiB 5996.38 GB)
   Raid Devices : 4
  Total Devices : 3
Preferred Minor : 1

    Update Time : Sun Feb  1 13:32:54 2015
          State : active
 Active Devices : 3
Working Devices : 3
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 0
       Checksum : fb959cff - correct
         Events : 0.1608150

         Layout : left-symmetric
     Chunk Size : 64K

      Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
this     2       8       35        2      active sync   /dev/sdc3

   0     0       0        0        0      removed
   1     1       8       19        1      active sync   /dev/sdb3
   2     2       8       35        2      active sync   /dev/sdc3
   3     3       8       51        3      active sync   /dev/sdd3

Now reassembling:

# Use /dev/mdNR that is not taken already
mdadm --assemble /dev/md1 /dev/sdb3 /dev/sdc3 /dev/sdd3

After executing this command, your RAID should be assembled and ready to mount:

mkdir /share/QSAVE
mount -t ext4 /dev/md1 /share/QSAVE

If everything went ok, you can see your data, when you'll:

cd /share/QSAVE
ls

Local backup

If you used a decent "rescue" HDD, you can now use it as a backup hard drive for all of your NAS data (as long as it is big enough):

mkdir /share/HDA_DATA/backup
rsync -rv /share/QSAVE/ /share/HDA_DATA/backup/

Remote backup

You can also backup your NAS remotely:

mkdir ./qnap_backup
rsync -rv --exclude=".*" admin@your-nas-ip:/share/QSAVE/ ./qnap_backup

Also keep in mind, that even when you have RAID1, RAID5, RAID10 and so on, it is still worth having an external backup of all of your data.

Seahorse doesn't unlock your keyring when you have auto login enabled. The funny thing is that even if you set up an empty password, you will still have to unlock it manually. Maybe it's a bug, maybe it's a security feature. Either way, if you have an encrypted LVM like I do, and you shutdown your computer when you don't need it having to unlock keyring each time can be a real pain in the ass. First you need to unlock whole system, then you skip login (because of the auto login), but you still need to unlock keyring.

Luckily there's a really simple solution to this:

Change your keyring password

First, you need to change your keyring password. Use unique pass-phrase that you don't use anywhere else because it's going to be stored in plain text. To do this, press ALT+F2, type seahorse and press enter. You will see following window:

Go to View and select By keyring. You should see something like this:

Right click on Login Keyring (the first one) and Change password. Then just provide an old one (should be the same as you account password) and a new one.

Create a simple Python script

Now you have a new keyring password. To unlock it automatically, we will use a simple Python script, that will be executed each time you are auto logged in:

#!/usr/bin/python

import gnomekeyring
gnomekeyring.unlock_sync(None, 'your keyring password');

save it as a hidden file somewhere in your home directory (I used ~/.keyring).

Now add executing rights:

chmod +x ./.keyring

You can also execute it to check if it's working:

[~]$ ./.keyring

If it doesn't you will see an error explanation:

[~]$ ./.keyring
Gkr-Message: secret service operation failed: The password was invalid
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./.keyring", line 3, in <module>
    gnomekeyring.unlock_sync(None, 'PyGaCQbiacPUPgFcJrwjIsEcz');
gnomekeyring.IOError

Add your keyring script to autostart (auto startup)

Just ffollow this article and in a command field put: /home/mencio/.keyring

That's all. After that, you should have automatically unlocked keyring after your auto login.

Tag: Linux

Recovering QNAP NAS lost data when NAS not starting properly