QNAP firmware Updates and Virtual Machines use Caution

One of my clients QNAP devices was largely out of date running version 3.2 something, I really wanted to get them onto 4.0 so I could get some nice Rsync and NAS to NAS backups happening. The QNAP runs as an NFS share with 2 VM's and vmdk files located on it and its connected directly to the ESXi server.

I started by shutting down all the VM's, then proceeded to update the QNAP to version 4.0. Update was successful and all looked well in the world of QNAP, however, something had happened where now I could not access the share via windows explorer for example before I could access \\192.168.0.199\VMStorage directly and see the vmdk files,  but now it was prompting for a username and a password.

Why do you need a password now?

The firmware update had brought with it some additional security settings which had caused the direct referencing of the share not to show the files anymore and it broke the connection with my datastore on my ESXi server. I was using the 'everyone' user in order to access the VMStorage. To fix this I had to create a new user on the QNAP and re-map the datastore on the ESXi server. Then I could boot my VM's no problems.

So if you are running a QNAP with several VM's on it with no security on the area where your VM's are stored then I would be cautious when updating the QNAP firmware. The best thing would be to have security on your VMStorage folder when you first set it up as QNAP is going to require you to do this when you upgrade.

QNAP TS-259 Pro and the battle of the firmware update

Today I decided to update the firmware on a QNAP TS-259 Pro, a network attached storage device which has a ton of built in servers. It runs a version of linux so is very popular with people who want to create custom firmwares etc.

QNAP TS-259 Pro NAS

I thought this would be a simple process, but I ran into a massive issue where the web interface and the QNAP Finder were not letting the update proceed. In both cases the upload of the firmware file was taking quite a while to upload, much longer then usual at least 10mins. It would get to around 20% then fail.

Next I proceeded to the Manual update of firmware
http://wiki.qnap.com/wiki/Manually_Updating_Firmware

This requires me to get Putty http://www.putty.org/ and to connect to the device and run some commands. All good pretty straight forward and then I get the error that I am out of space somewhere in the process of the extracting of the files.

To get around this I did the following:

1. Used the 'df' command in the putty prompt it shows the details of the different folders and look for any that have a high % of data used.
2. I found the /mnt/HDA_ROOT/  file is at around 95% so I targeted this folder.
3. I manually went through each file and folder in the folder and check for large files and remove, namely any tmp files I could see.
4. Eventually I came across the .spool folder in there was a file which was around 400Mb in size!, found it removed the file (using 'rm')
5. Tried again to do the process in the wiki and boom everything updated smoothly.

So in closing check the .spool folder for any large garbage files that you can clear out and then you should be  golden. After this worked for me now the GUI web interface works as well as the QNAP finder. Seeing as this server was used as a print server it might be work clearing the print queue through the web interface before trying a firmware update as I think they use the same default storage area of /mnt/HDA_ROOT/

All in all these QNAP devices are great I have used several of them and in my experience even if there is a problem it is quite easy to find a solution as they are inherently such open devices.