Install Arch Linux on QNAP NAS
PURPOSE
I have an old QNAP TS-559 Pro+ I purchased in 2010, with five 2T Samsung SATA mechanical hard drives. I never really liked the QNAP OS (which is basically a nonstandard Linux distribution with a disgusting web GUI), but at the time I had no experience with RAID or multi-disk setups, and I was using this as my main data storage for over ten years. I'd been trying to monitor the disks with SMART, but QNAP wasn't very good at notifying me of things going wrong.
Now, with all of the security problems with the QNAP OS over the last couple of years, I've decided to throw it out and replace it with Arch Linux. The inspiration I've had comes from the QNAP Firmware Recovery Guide for x86-based NAS itself.
I have set up my new NAS from scratch, from a refurbished Dell R730, with eight 14T drives. I have yet to write an article describing that setup, but I started with Arch Linux ant Btrfs and I've been quite happy with it. Now it's time to do the same with this QNAP, and possibly use it as a stage for restoring and testing my Borg Backup. Hopefully these eleven year old disks are up to the task, we'll see!
PREREQUISITES
- A QNAP NAS with an x86_64 CPU with at least 512M RAM(in my case, the QNAP TS-559 Pro+ has an x86_64 dual-core [four virtual Hyperthreading cores] Intel Atom CPU and 1G RAM).
- The latest copy of the Arch Linux ISO. Standard Arch Linux is only compatible with x86_64/amd64 processors, and requires at least 512M RAM.
- Hard drives which you don't care about the data on them. The firmware guide linked above instructs the user to disconnect all hard drives, but I will not do that since I want to wipe the mdadm RAID headers and replace them with Btrfs. This will DESTROY ALL DATA ON THESE DRIVES.
PROCEDURE
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Power down the QNAP NAS, and connect a keyboard and monitor.
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Copy the Arch ISO to a USB flash drive, and insert it into one of the USB ports in the back. There may be a USB port in the front (mine is labeled COPY, I didn't use it to boot). These are steps 1.1 through 1.3 of the current Arch Linux Installation Guide.
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Power on the QNAP NAS to boot. The American Megatrends BIOS should display on initial boot. Pressing DEL should take you to the BIOS Setup, where you can choose the USB boot device order. I looked at this first, but didn't change anything. I rebooted after reviewing the BIOS setup.
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There is a separate boot menu to select a boot device (separate from the BIOS Setup menu). For me, pressing F11 brought up the boot device menu. Select your inserted USB drive (the name will vary, for me it was "Generic USB flash drive").
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If all goes well, you should be greeted with the Arch Linux boot menu. I don't have any special needs, so I simply chose the default option and booted Arch Linux by pressing Enter.
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After a few moments, the Arch ISO root prompt should appear. This is step 1.4 of the Arch Linux Installation Guide.
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The first command I ran was
free -h, to ensure I had enough RAM to proceed with the installation. Here's what I saw:total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 961Mi 127Mi 306Mi 174Mi 528Mi 522Mi Swap: 0B 0B 0B 0B 0B 0B -
Next, I ran lsblk -f to see what disks are available:
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS loop0 squashfs 4.0 0 100% /run/archiso/airootfs sda |-sda1 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 2a4fc966-b266-152a-a95d-b8568abffd89 | `-md125 ext3 1.0 00da1ca2-853a-425a-9d24-5b6b781853b7 |-sda2 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 a901d9ec-9995-4602-7dfd-a0917d4560a8 | `-md127 swap 1 758bf748-4844-49d9-b996-5926c0f951c8 |-sda3 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 824fdb0c-1b9c-413d-d990-7eb5c420603e | `-md126 ext4 1.0 2c70f0c7-9dcf-40bb-8a6d-69a0e4dece53 `-sda4 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 060a74d9-e9fd-f8d0-f1df-d4da5ea31708 `-md124 ext3 1.0 2df61ff4-fd5b-48b4-8917-b2c75b7ee9a7 sdb |-sdb1 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 2a4fc966-b266-152a-a95d-b8568abffd89 | `-md125 ext3 1.0 00da1ca2-853a-425a-9d24-5b6b781853b7 |-sdb2 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 a901d9ec-9995-4602-7dfd-a0917d4560a8 | `-md127 swap 1 758bf748-4844-49d9-b996-5926c0f951c8 |-sdb3 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 824fdb0c-1b9c-413d-d990-7eb5c420603e | `-md126 ext4 1.0 2c70f0c7-9dcf-40bb-8a6d-69a0e4dece53 `-sdb4 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 060a74d9-e9fd-f8d0-f1df-d4da5ea31708 `-md124 ext3 1.0 2df61ff4-fd5b-48b4-8917-b2c75b7ee9a7 sdc |-sdc1 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 2a4fc966-b266-152a-a95d-b8568abffd89 | `-md125 ext3 1.0 00da1ca2-853a-425a-9d24-5b6b781853b7 |-sdc2 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 a901d9ec-9995-4602-7dfd-a0917d4560a8 | `-md127 swap 1 758bf748-4844-49d9-b996-5926c0f951c8 |-sdc3 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 824fdb0c-1b9c-413d-d990-7eb5c420603e | `-md126 ext4 1.0 2c70f0c7-9dcf-40bb-8a6d-69a0e4dece53 `-sdc4 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 060a74d9-e9fd-f8d0-f1df-d4da5ea31708 `-md124 ext3 1.0 2df61ff4-fd5b-48b4-8917-b2c75b7ee9a7 sdd |-sdd1 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 2a4fc966-b266-152a-a95d-b8568abffd89 | `-md125 ext3 1.0 00da1ca2-853a-425a-9d24-5b6b781853b7 |-sdd2 linux_raid_member 1.0 5 d4116d1c-5a51-908b-449c-f5d3d7757823 | `-md127 swap 1 758bf748-4844-49d9-b996-5926c0f951c8 |-sdd3 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 824fdb0c-1b9c-413d-d990-7eb5c420603e | `-md126 ext4 1.0 2c70f0c7-9dcf-40bb-8a6d-69a0e4dece53 `-sdd4 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 060a74d9-e9fd-f8d0-f1df-d4da5ea31708 `-md124 ext3 1.0 2df61ff4-fd5b-48b4-8917-b2c75b7ee9a7 sde |-sde1 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 2a4fc966-b266-152a-a95d-b8568abffd89 | `-md125 ext3 1.0 00da1ca2-853a-425a-9d24-5b6b781853b7 |-sde2 linux_raid_member 1.0 5 d4116d1c-5a51-908b-449c-f5d3d7757823 | `-md127 swap 1 758bf748-4844-49d9-b996-5926c0f951c8 |-sde3 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 824fdb0c-1b9c-413d-d990-7eb5c420603e | `-md126 ext4 1.0 2c70f0c7-9dcf-40bb-8a6d-69a0e4dece53 `-sde4 linux_raid_member 0.90.0 060a74d9-e9fd-f8d0-f1df-d4da5ea31708 `-md124 ext3 1.0 2df61ff4-fd5b-48b4-8917-b2c75b7ee9a7 sdf iso9660 Joliet Extension ARCH_202110 2021-10-01-17-00-36-00 |-sdf1 iso9660 Joliet Extension ARCH_202110 2021-10-01-17-00-36-00 0 100% /run/archiso/bootmnt `-sdf2 vfat FAT16 ARCHISO_EFI EEA4-A93D sdg |-sdg1 ext2 1.0 aabf92c8-14ce-46a8-9af2-9e27b1a5412e |-sdg2 ext2 1.0 QTS_BOOT_PART2 fb8691c0-9b2a-49f4-89c4-03aabe16fa1f |-sdg3 ext2 1.0 QTS_BOOT_PART3 5247d82d-b11e-48c1-ab9d-adaf87488239 |-sdg4 |-sdg5 ext2 1.0 ba5d6eee-24a9-43bc-b861-8f4ebfbcd2c7 `-sdg6 ext2 1.0 585712c4-ff3c-4ac1-a60c-4f06e9544d73As you can see, the existing disk partitioning is quite complicated. The interesting bits are that I have five mechanical Serial ATA hard drives, /dev/sd[a-e]. The Arch ISO USB drive is /dev/sdf, while there's another USB drive on /dev/sdg. /dev/sdg is the internal USB-attached flash storage, as seen by the QTS_BOOT_PART[23] label.
This mdadm RAID array is very old, and it appears to be detected automatically by the Linux kernel on the booted Arch ISO (version 5.14.8) as four md devices (/dev/md12[4-7]). I'm not sure how these are assembled into one disk, the QNAP Linux OS is not laid out in a standard Linux Standards Base (LSB) fashion. -
Rather than spending hours trying to remount these in Arch, I will repartition them fresh. First, I used madadm --manage --stop on all of the md devices created by the kernel:
# for md in /dev/md12{4..7}; do mdadm --manage --stop ${md} done -
Next, I used sgdisk --zap-all to delete the partition table on /dev/sd[a-eg].
# for disk in /dev/sd{a..e} /dev/sdg; do sgdisk --zap-all ${disk} done -
I ran
partprobewith no options, to ensure the kernel had the latest, clean partition table for all block devices.lsblk -fshowed the following:NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS loop0 squashfs 4.0 0 100% /run/archiso/airootfs sda sdb sdc sdd sde sdf iso9660 Joliet Extension ARCH_202110 2021-10-01-17-00-36-00 |-sdf1 iso9660 Joliet Extension ARCH_202110 2021-10-01-17-00-36-00 0 100% /run/archiso/bootmnt `-sdf2 vfat FAT16 ARCHISO_EFI EEA4-A93D sdg -
Before continuing, I followed the Arch Linux Installation Guide. Since this host had been on the network, and had a static DHCP lease set up on my router, the IP address, gateway, and DNS information was already assigned on boot:
# ip a s 1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000 link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever inet6 ::1/128 scope host valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 2: enp2s0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state DOWN group default qlen 1000 link/ether 00:08:9b:c5:26:0e brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff 3: enp3s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000 link/ether 00:08:9b:c5:26:0d brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 10.20.30.11/24 metric 100 brd 10.20.30.255 scope global dynamic enp3s0 valid_lft 488sec preferred_lft 488sec inet6 fe80::208:9bff:fec5:260d/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft foreverThis host had the hostname
sodiumpreviously, which I intended to keep. My local network is10.20.30.0/24, and most of the hosts on my network take chemical element names. Incidentally 11 is the atomic number of sodium, so it has the host address10.20.30.11. Yeah, I'm a geek. This was all set up automatically, and I intended to keep this once we get to the network setup. -
The next step was to ensure the time on the system was set up correctly, using
timedatectl. Unfortunately, unlike most Linux systems, QNAP had the hardware/RTC clock set to local time, not Universal Coordinated Time (UTC [it's a French acronym]). I determined this with the date command, which didn't have the correct time (it looks like it drifted forward eight minutes having been powered off for several months). To fix it, I ran the following:# date Sat Oct 2 08:39:49 PM UTC 2021 # timedatectl set-ntp true # timedatectl set-local-rtc false --adjust-system-clock # timedatectl set-timezone America/New_York # date Sat Oct 2 08:31:23 PM EDT 2021 -
Next step was to partition the disks. I had already listed a concise listing with
lsblk -fabove. Below is the output offdisk -l:Disk /dev/sda: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors Disk model: SAMSUNG HD204UI Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk /dev/sdb: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors Disk model: SAMSUNG HD204UI Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk /dev/sdc: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors Disk model: SAMSUNG HD204UI Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk /dev/sdd: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors Disk model: SAMSUNG HD204UI Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk /dev/sde: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors Disk model: SAMSUNG HD204UI Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk /dev/sdf: 57.62 GiB, 61865984000 bytes, 120832000 sectors Disk model: USB Flash Disk Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x8ab3e64f Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sdf1 * 64 1556479 1556416 760M 0 Empty /dev/sdf2 1556480 1732607 176128 86M ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32) Disk /dev/sdg: 492 MiB, 515899392 bytes, 1007616 sectors Disk model: USB DISK MODULE Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk /dev/loop0: 673.11 MiB, 705802240 bytes, 1378520 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytesMy next step is to partition /dev/sdg. Since this system was so old, I chose not to use a GPT partition table (using an MS-DOS partition table instead) in case the QNAP BIOS couldn't handle the GPT table directly. I used
partedto do this with one command:# parted --align optimal --script -- /dev/sdg mklabel msdos mkpart primary 2048s 100% set 1 boot on # fdisk -l /dev/sdg Disk /dev/sdg: 492 MiB, 515899392 bytes, 1007616 sectors Disk model: USB DISK MODULE Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0xe19d9fd2 Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sdg1 * 2048 1007615 1005568 491M 83 Linux -
Next, I partitioned the remaining disks. I chose two partitions for the disks, one for software/md RAID6 (for swap space), and the other for Btrfs:
# for disk in /dev/sd{a..e}; do parted --align optimal --script -- \ ${disk} mklabel gpt \ mkpart swap linux-swap 2048s 512MiB \ mkpart data btrfs 512MiB 100% doneThe reason I did this is because Btrfs does not support swap files on multi-device filesystems currently.
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Next, combine the swap disks into a RAID6 array with mdadm, then create the swap partition:
# mdadm --create /dev/md0 \ --raid-devices=4 --spare-devices=1 --level=6 /dev/sd{a..e}1 mdadm: Defaulting to version 1.2 metadata mdadm: array /dev/md0 started. # mkswap /dev/md0 Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 1018 MiB (1067446272 bytes) no label, UUID=6a88dd29-dab7-4b27-b6bf-c5f05f2ffe63 # swapon -
Create the Btrfs array, with data and metadata in RAID10 configuration:
# mkfs.btrfs --data raid10 --metadata raid10 /dev/sd{a..d}2 btrfs-progs v5.14.1 See http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org for more information. Label: (null) UUID: 4e7ceed0-d011-4d22-9207-f30155447972 Node size: 16384 Sector size: 4096 Filesystem size: 7.28TiB Block group profiles: Data: RAID10 2.00GiB Metadata: RAID10 512.00MiB System: RAID10 16.00MiB SSD detected: no Zoned device: no Incompat features: extref, skinny-metadata Runtime features: Checksum: crc32c Number of devices: 4 Devices: ID SIZE PATH 1 1.82TiB /dev/sda2 2 1.82TiB /dev/sdb2 3 1.82TiB /dev/sdc2 4 1.82TiB /dev/sdd2 -
Next step is to mount the disks:
# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt # mkdir /mnt/boot # mount /dev/sdg1 /mnt/bootNote, you only need to specify one of the member devices when mounting a Btrfs filesystem.
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Now the installation can begin in earnest. The first step is to select appropriate mirrors with
reflector:# reflector --age 12 --country US --fastest 5 --protocol https -
After this I bootstrap the base installation with
pacstrap:# pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware btrfs-progs vim borg openssh smartmontools postfix logwatch mdadm -
Then I run
genfstab:# genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstabLooking at /mnt/etc/fstab, I see that it didn't pick up the swap partition (possibly because I didn't include mdadm to pacstrap originally), so I added it. My /mnt/etc/fstab looks like this:'
# /dev/sda2 UUID=4e7ceed0-d011-4d22-9207-f30155447972 / btrfs rw,relatime,space_cache,subvolid=5,subvol=/ 0 0 # /dev/sdg1 UUID=6a5ee83a-c37b-453f-b574-712f24ecc801 /boot ext4 rw,relatime 0 2 # /dev/md0 (swap) UUID=6a88dd29-dab7-4b27-b6bf-c5f05f2ffe63 none swap defaults 0 0 -
Now it's time to enter the Arch chroot with
arch-chroot /mnt. At this point, I'm at step 3.3 of the Arch Linux Installation Guide. It's pretty straightforward, I'm not going to reproduce each step of the guide. I did have to addmdadm_udevto the HOOKS of /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, so the swap partition would be picked up on boot. For the network manager I went with systemd-networkd, since it's installed by default. For the bootloader, I went with GRUB, since this is a BIOS system and it's what I'm most familiar with. -
Now it's time to reboot. Before I do, I exit the chroot with Ctrl-D/exit, and copy the SSH host keys to /mnt/etc/ssh/ before I continue. Since I did this remotely from my laptop, I also copied the contents of /root/.ssh to /mnt/root/ (mainly to include my
authorized_keysfile, so I can log in without a password).
RESULTS
Success! It booted on the first try. Three things I forgot to do was set up the systemd-networkd configuration file, enable systemd-resolved, and enable sshd:
/etc/systemd/network/20-wired.network
[Match]
Name=enp3s0
[Network]
DHCP=yes
# systemctl restart systemd-networkd.service
# systemctl enable --now systemd-resolved.service
# ln -sf /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf
# systemctl enable --now sshd.service
Now, it's ready to be managed remotely!
POST INSTALLATION THOUGHTS
If I were planning on using this system as an actual storage device, I probably should have been more mindful about the Btrfs setup. Namely, setting up a subvolume for the root filesystem, instead of the top-level subvolume. Now, for this system I'm not really using it as primary data storage, so this doesn't really matter. Assuming the disks are healthy enough, I will use it as a staging area for testing restoring my Borg Backup.
Now that I've gotten my first SMART report, these disks may have a firmware bug that could lead to data loss. I do remember updating the firmware several years ago, precisely because of this bug. Unfortunately smartd doesn't seem to be able to tell if the patched firmware was applied. It does provide a couple of links to more information, I'll need to read them and see if I can do anything about it.
NEXT STEPS
First order of business is to review the Borg Backup documentation linked above, and determine exactly how restores work. Make sure I can restore all of the systems I've been backing up to my Dell R730 (which I've named tennessine, in honor of my move to Tennessee). There's about 2.6T worth of deduplicated, compressed data on tennessine, which happens to be 1.1T less than how much is free on this QNAP NAS (sodium, chemical symbol Na). So, restored this data will be much larger , I'll have to restore one host at a time. This is a process which will take several weeks, time permitting.
Once I'm comfortable restoring data on my local network using Borg, I can begin backing up things in the cloud. I've chosen Backblaze for this purpose, but I'm not quite there yet. I haven't decided if I will continue using the duplicity tool which I've used for Backblaze thus far, or if I will use something else. Perhaps I can wait for a Borg->Backblaze integration, maybe using something like sshfs to link Borg to Backblaze (as far as I'm aware Borg can only work on locally mounted filesystems, or over SSH/SFTP). To my knowledge the tooling isn't there yet, but I will investigate later once I'm ready.
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