Comments on: I got a QNAP

By: iain

iain — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:38:01 +0000

For the Samba thing, as I mentioned before the QNAP will live in the domain quite happily if you don't care about preserving UIDs (which you would if you were also mounting the shares over NFS). You would edit /etc/smb.conf (outside the chroot) in the same way as any other Linux machine on the network and use /usr/local/samba/bin/net join to join the domain.

If you do care about UIDs (as I did) you would need to follow the rest of the steps I did above, remembering to disable Samba from the QNAP web interface so the "wrong" smbd isn't restarted. And in this case too you configure smb.conf (inside the chroot) in the same way you usually would for another Linux machine.

By: jofafrazze

jofafrazze — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:23:23 +0000

Thanks for the reply Iain,

now it makes sense with the double system. It turned out that someone/something had mounted the Qmultimedia inside th chroot’s /ext already (The SlimServer installation I suppose).

By: inspire

inspire — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:15:59 +0000

We basically need that QNAP NAS could “recognize” the domain accounts (users, groups, etc.) of our PDC (SAMBA+LDAP running on a Fedora Box) with windows/linux/mac clients. I am a little confused right now on what I’ve to do after we bought the QNAP TS 409.

By: iain

iain — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:03:59 +0000

I had the Samba setup that I installed in the chroot working as you describe. Eventually I decided it would be easier just to make it a domain controller but still pulling the LDAP data from a separate machine.

If you don’t care about UID mapping the QNAP will work out of the box[1] as the Samba outside the chroot has LDAP support compiled in. I wanted UID mapping to work consistently with NFS, however, so I was forced to install Samba in the chroot as in my post.

[1] Well maybe not really out of the box. The QNAP web interface won’t allow you to set this up but if you know your way around smb.conf you can do it yourself.

By: inspire

inspire — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:52:32 +0000

Hi there Iain,

I am interested in one of QNAP Products. The qnap 409 ts pro for my company. However we are concerned about the fact that probably it wouldn’t satisfy one of our needs. We need a NAS-Server fully compatible with our Domain (Samba3 running in one of our Linux servers with a LDAP backend for storing users and its attributes) to act as a client and therefore allowing users to access shares on the NAS server.
We do not have Active Directory (Windows Server Domain).

Best Regards,

By: iain

iain — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:14:30 +0000

You would need to add it to the export script:

    for share in Qmultimedia home files smb; do
    ...

The key line is the bind mount:

    mount -o bind

This is mounting the same thing in two places. Since the script runs outside the chroot it would end up mounting Qmultimedia inside it where you can access it.

The reason cfv won't work (and the reason why I had to install my own Samba) is also the reason why they have the double system. The core NAS stuff (kernel, NFS service, limited CIFS service) are built to be as small and fast as possible while maintaining a whole Linux distribution on the much larger storage where you can install pretty much everything you want. And you can break it, too, without affecting the running of the system.

By: jofafrazze

jofafrazze — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:57:01 +0000

Impressive! I’ve got a TS-209 Pro of my own and inspired by your text I tried the chroot and apt-get part for installing cfv. As a Linux newbie I got confused by the second half of your post however. I would like to use cfv to work on my files in /share/MD0_DATA/Qmultimedia, which is outside the chroot. And cfv doesn’t seem to work from the real root. Could you please help me out on this one? And why would they create a “double” system like this (real root vs. chroot systems)?