Tag Archives: Synology

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Installing TrueNAS Scale on a Terra Master NAS

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My 10+ year old Synology NAS failed recently. I tried replacing the power supply and replacing the CMOS battery but it would not come back to life, so I started searching around for a replacement.

I originally intended to buy another Synology NAS, but when I looked over the various models I came to the conclusion that Synology was not keeping up with the competition in terms of hardware. I could get a NAS from a competitor with faster networking, a faster CPU, and more RAM for about half the price. Also, many of the apps that I’d originally used on the Synology NAS were no longer being supported by Synology, and most of the new apps they’d added were Synology-branded apps with unknown provenance and unknown support status, not open-source apps that I could Google a fix for if I had a problem.

After looking at a few brands I picked a low-end 4-drive Terra Master, the F4-424. The F4-424 comes in 3 flavors, the F4-424, F4-424 Pro, and F4-424 Max. The 3 share the same chassis, with main difference between the models being the RAM, CPU, GPU, and NICs being used. I’m mostly using the NAS as backup storage for all of my home computers, plus test storage (Minio, IPFS) for various Kubernetes test clusters, so I didn’t need lots of RAM, a fast CPU, or 10GbE. With the low-end F4-424 I was still getting a 4-core Intel CPU with 8GB DDR5 RAM and 2x 2.5GbE NICs, which is more than adequate for my needs.

I’d read that the Terra Master OS (TOS) wasn’t great, but what sold me on the Terra Master is that it’s basically a low-power Intel PC, so if you want to install some other OS on it, like TrueNAS Scale, openmediavault, or UnRAID, you can. I also read that Terra Master had just released TOS 6, and that it was a huge improvement over previous releases.

I set up the Terra Master with 4x Western Digital 8TB “Red” NAS drives and 2x Western Digital 1TB “Black” NVMe drives. I used TOS 6 for a week, and I thought it was fine. It was actually fairly simple to set up and run, supported using the NVMe drives for R/W cache, supported Time Machine backups, iSCSI, SMB, and NFS. I had no issues with it.

But I wanted to try out TrueNAS Scale so I downloaded a copy of the ISO and burned it to a USB flash drive. The Terra Master has a single USB-A port on the back, so I connected a USB hub and plugged in the flash drive, a keyboard, and a mouse. (There are YouTube videos that say you need to take the NAS apart and install the flash drive in an internal USB slot. You do not need to do this.)

I rebooted the NAS and started hitting the DEL key when it first powered on to get into the BIOS. First I went to the Boot screen and disabled the “UTOS Boot First” setting. This is the setting that tells the NAS to boot TOS 6 from a 3.75GB internal flash drive.

Next I went to the Save & Exit screen and selected my USB drive as the Boot Override device. It booted up my USB flash drive and I followed the TrueNAS Scale install instructions to install TrueNAS Scale on the first NVMe drive. It only took a minute or two.

Once that was done I rebooted again, and started hitting the DEL key when it rebooted to get into the BIOS. This time I went to the Boot screen to change the primary boot device. One of the NVMe disks was now labeled “Debian”. That’s the TrueNAS disk so I selected that, then saved and exited.

Once the NAS booted up the screen displayed the IP address and URL for logging in, so I went to my laptop and logged into the web UI to finish the setup. I added the 4x 8TB drives to a single RAIDZ1 storage pool and made the remaining 1TB NVMe drive into a R/W cache drive.

If I want to go back to TOS 6 I can re-enable the “UTOS Boot First” setting in BIOS, boot from the TOS6 flash drive, and rebuild the disk array. If I want to use the NVMe drive that TrueNAS is on for something else I can try installing TrueNAS on the TOS 6 flash drive but I’m not convinced that it will fit on a 3.75GB drive. I checked the size of the TrueNAS install and it looks like it might just barely fit.

Hope you find this useful.

Adding a LUKS-encrypted iSCSI volume to Synology DS414 NAS and Ubuntu 15.04

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I have an Ubuntu 15.04 “Vivid” workstation already set up with LUKS full disk encryption, and I have a Synology DS414 NAS with 12TB raw storage on my home network. I wanted to add a disk volume on the Synology DS414 that I could mount on the Ubuntu server, but NFS doesn’t support “at rest” encrypted file systems, and using EncFS over NFS seemed like the wrong way to go about it, so I decided to try setting up an iSCSI volume and encrypting it with LUKS. Using this type of setup, all data is encrypted both “on the wire” and “at rest”.

Log into the Synology Admin Panel and select Main Menu > Storage Manager:

  • Add an iSCSI LUN
    • Set Thin Provisioning = No
    • Advanced LUN Features = No
    • Make the volume as big as you need
  • Add an iSCSI Target
    • Use CHAP authentication
    • Write down the login name and password you choose

On your Ubuntu box switch over to a root prompt:

sudo /bin/bash

Install the open-iscsi drivers. (Since I’m already running LUKS on my Ubuntu box I don’t need to install LUKS.)

apt-get install open-iscsi

Edit the conf file

vi /etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf

Edit these lines:

node.startup = automatic
node.session.auth.username = [CHAP user name on Synology box]
node.session.auth.password = [CHAP password on Synology box]

Restart the open-iscsi service:

service open-iscsi restart
service open-iscsi status

Start open-iscsi at boot time:

systemctl enable open-iscsi

Now find the name of the iSCSI target on the Synology box:

iscsiadm -m discovery -t st -p $SYNOLOGY_IP
iscsiadm -m node

The target name should look something like “iqn.2000-01.com.synology:boxname.target-1.62332311”

Still on the Ubuntu workstation, log into the iSCSI target:

iscsiadm -m node --targetname "$TARGET_NAME" --portal "$SYNOLOGY_IP:3260" --login

Look for new devices:

fdisk -l

At this point fdisk should show you a new block device which is the iSCSI disk volume on the Synology box. In my case it was /dev/sdd.

Partition the device. I made one big /dev/sdd1 partition, type 8e (Linux LVM):

fdisk /dev/sdd

Set up the device as a LUKS-encrypted device:

cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdd1

Open the LUKS volume:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdd1 backupiscsi

Create a physical volume from the LUKS volume:

pvcreate /dev/mapper/backupiscsi

Add that to a new volume group:

vgcreate ibackup /dev/mapper/backupiscsi

Create a logical volume within the volume group:

lvcreate -L 1800GB -n backupvol /dev/ibackup

Put a file system on the logical volume:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/ibackup/backupvol

Add the logical volume to /etc/fstab to mount it on startup:

# Synology iSCSI target LUN-1
/dev/ibackup/backupvol /mnt/backup ext4 defaults,nofail,nobootwait 0 6

Get the UUID of the iSCSI drive:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid | grep sdd1

Add the UUID to /etc/crypttab to be automatically prompted for the decrypt passphrase when you boot up Ubuntu:

backupiscsi UUID=693568ca-9334-4c19-8b01-881f2247ae0d none luks

If you found this interesting, you might want to check out my article Adding an external encrypted drive with LVM to Ubuntu Linux.

Hope you found this useful.