Format drives in NSA325-v2

azimuth

HI. The hard drives in my NSA325-v2 need to be replaced because of bad SMART values (have already initiated RMA with WD) so I need to format them before sending to WD. Is it possible to do directly in NAS? Is it enough to delete the existing volume? Or should I connect the drives to my PC and format there?

#NAS_Nov_2018

Mijzelf

I guess this is a privacy concern? In that case nor deleting the volume, nor formatting the disk will suffice. You'll have to overwrite the disk completely.

That can be done on the NAS. If you want to wipe both disks, use the telnet backdoor to get shell access. Login as root, using your admin password, and execute

<div>dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=16M >/dev/null 2>&1 &</div><div>dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=16M >/dev/null 2>&1 &</div><div></div>

This will copy the contents of /dev/zero (an endless stream of zeros) to /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, being the first and second harddisk. The > and the code hereafter redirects the output to nowhere, and put the command in background, so that is will continue if you close telnet.

I think it will run at about 50MB/sec, so you can calculate how much time it will take. Probably you can hear when it's done.

Mijzelf

I guess this is a privacy concern? In that case nor deleting the volume, nor formatting the disk will suffice. You'll have to overwrite the disk completely.

That can be done on the NAS. If you want to wipe both disks, use the telnet backdoor to get shell access. Login as root, using your admin password, and execute

<div>dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=16M >/dev/null 2>&1 &</div><div>dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=16M >/dev/null 2>&1 &</div><div></div>

This will copy the contents of /dev/zero (an endless stream of zeros) to /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, being the first and second harddisk. The > and the code hereafter redirects the output to nowhere, and put the command in background, so that is will continue if you close telnet.

I think it will run at about 50MB/sec, so you can calculate how much time it will take. Probably you can hear when it's done.

azimuth

Yes, my concern is privacy since the drives store private photos and videos.
Is the telnet backdoor available in firmware V4.81(AALS.1)? Should I first delete the volume? I currently have a RAID1 volume and I guess the system will be busy synchronizing the disks while that command is running.

OT: Is that telnet backdoor accessible from internet? Or only locally? Sounds a bit scary that someone can get access to it and wipe my data remotely...

Mijzelf

I guess the system will be busy synchronizing the disks while that command is running.

No. The raid layer only detects changes if they are made from the upper layer, the filesystem. In this case the changes are made on the lowest possible layer, this disk itself.

Should I first delete the volume?

It won't hurt. Eventually the filesystem will crash, as it's wiped under the mount. Maybe that will cause the beeper to panic. Deleting the volume will prevent that.

OT: Is that telnet backdoor accessible from internet? Or only locally? Sounds a bit scary that someone can get access to it and wipe my data remotely...

If you have forwarded the webinterface port to the internet everybody knowing your admin password can open the telnet backdoor.  That backdoor itself can only be used if you also forwarded the telnet port.

BTW. I would be more concerned for malware than for somebody wiping my data. You have a backup, don't you?

azimuth

No, I haven't forwarded the port. And yes, I have backed up the data. 

Thanks, I will run the commands. My calculations show that it will take about 16 hours...

UPD: Surprisingly it's already done.