Zyxel NSA325v2 USB drive availability/mount

gotjee
gotjee Posts: 5  Freshman Member
edited November 2019 in Personal Cloud Storage
Hi,
I have connected a WD elements to my zyxel, via the front port for the USB3.
I run FFP & have edited the NFS shares to be able to target the external disk, as i was going to use this disk as a permanent expansion on the NAS.

All of this works, but it looks like the mount goes away sometimes, if I then look in the e-data folder it's not there... after a while it might reappear.
Also when I reboot and look in e-data it's not their, but if I then go to the NAS Zyxel Web page and look under Storage - Volume, then I see the USB drive appear on the webpage. If I then check e-data it's also there, so this triggers something?

Drive was NTFS first but when I saw the issue I reformatted to EXT4 to see if It would improve, but am still seeing the same.
Is this a known thing with the automatic mounting of USB drives or something?

When it does appear mount shows me this:
/dev/sdc on /e-data/0979e732-1d44-48b2-bcda-af74d0a0884a type ext4 (rw,relatime,barrier=1,stripe=1,data=ordered)

In the Tweaks package I saw something called "USB disk somnifacient" not sure if that could help,  haven't touched it since I don't understand it :)

Anything I can do to improve the stability of this mount? 


#NAS_Nov_2019

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  • Mijzelf
    Mijzelf Posts: 2,598  Guru Member
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    Does dmesg show anything interesting at them moment the disk disappears or reappears?

    About "USB disk somnifacient", it's a script to put the disk asleep when it's not accessed for some time. That won't help you here. Actually I think your problem is caused by the disk to go asleep itself, and somehow signs out. The question is, how does it reappear?

    BTW, on the fw5 devices (NAS326, NAS5xx) usb disks are put asleep by the firmware, by a daemon called diskidle. Some thumb drives don't like that, and disappear. Not practical when that's an FFP or Entware-ng stick. The remedy is to delete the device node (e.g. /dev/sdc). Diskidle uses that node to access the disk to put it asleep, but further it's not used. The partition nodes (e.g. /dev/sdc1 and /dev/sdc2) are mounted.

  • gotjee
    gotjee Posts: 5  Freshman Member
    Hi,
     I cleared desmg & rebooted NAS,  after reboot no mount in e-data  & desmg shows the following:
    [Sun Nov 24 20:43:05 2019] .
    [Sun Nov 24 20:43:05 2019] Adding 514040k swap on /dev/sdb1.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:514040k
    [Sun Nov 24 20:43:05 2019] Adding 524280k swap on /i-data/.system/swap_ul6545p.  Priority:-2 extents:3 across:540664k
    [Sun Nov 24 20:43:05 2019] GbE port 0: TxEnable WA - Enabled, deep=1, tx_en_bk=1
    [Sun Nov 24 20:43:05 2019] _hcd 0000:00:01.0: WARN: Stalled endpoint
    [Sun Nov 24 20:43:05 2019] svc: failed to register lockdv1 RPC service (errno 97).
    [Sun Nov 24 20:43:05 2019] xhci_hcd 0000:00:01.0: WARN: Stalled endpoint
    I'm pasting the unique lines, the last line was in there about 30 times.
    I also checked /etc/mtab after boot, the disk is not in there.

    Then I surf to the zyxel:80 page and log in as admin. On that initial page it already shows your disks, I refresh e-data folder, the disk is now there, also it's now in /etc/mtab/ , no real different messages in desmg when this mount happens.

    So no mount @ boot, but it does mount when surfing to the zyxel:80 overview page. I have not seen it disappear anymore, but i have been rebooting the NAS quite a lot, so maybe it's just the not mounting @ boot that is the issue at the moment.

    After boot when it's not auto-mounted I do see the with fdisk -l etc.
    Would it be an option to make my own mount command & add this in one of the startup scripts that I already use? 

    When it's getting mounted by Zyxel I see the following in etc/mtab
    /dev/sdc /e-data/0979e732-1d44-48b2-bcda-af64d0a0884a ext4 rw,relatime,barrier=1,stripe=1,data=ordered 0 0
    Maybe I have to base myself on that for my own boot-mount command? I use some linux, but have never done any mounting though so some advice/comments are welcome. Not sure if I should then have to use the same naming or just something else, can 1 disk be mounted twice on linux? :)

  • gotjee
    gotjee Posts: 5  Freshman Member
    I have been playing around a bit:
    using the cron deamon from the tweaks package I added
    @reboot sleep 30 && /bin/mkdir e-data/frontUSB && /bin/mount /dev/sdc /e-data/frontUSB

    When I reboot and winscp can re-establish it's ssh connection, indeed after 30 sec I do see the e-data/frontUSB and can access the data on it.
    Afterwards when I go to the zyxel:80 admin page which used to trigger the mount creation,  it already shows this mount. the /e-data/0979e732-1d44-48b2-bcda-af64d0a0884a  does not get created :)
    I found out this is the UUID, zyxel uses that to create the mounts, so probably also does a check too see if there is already a mount existing for that UUID/drive or something. Because 2 mounts to same drive looks to be possible I tried that before when creating my frontUSB mount manually from commandline when the UUID mount was already existing and didn't see a problem.

    So I think this is a solution for me? even though I don't understand why I don't find anyone else mentioning this problem with USB-drives not mounting @ boot on a zyxel. 
  • Mijzelf
    Mijzelf Posts: 2,598  Guru Member
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    So I think this is a solution for me?

    If it works, yes. Although that 'WARN: Stalled endpoint' is a bit worrying, and probably also the root cause of your problem. Maybe the disk needs that much time to initialize that it misses the first mount attempt? It surprises me a bit that apparently the web back-end triggers a new attempt.


  • gotjee
    gotjee Posts: 5  Freshman Member
    @Mijzelf I agree that the 'WARN: Stalled endpoint' is strange.
    And everything does work but I might still dig a bit deeper :smile:

    I read that some kernels have problems with USB3.0 disks.. Where they throw those messages & fall back to USB2.0 speeds etc. I have just been transferring data to the disk and it was about 53MB/s which is  actualy within USB2.0 specs . So i'll try to look in linux to see if it synched USB2 or 3.

    Because it might not even be needed to have it linked to the front USB port.  If this 53 was my disk it's limit .

    Depending on that i'll have a check to see if it transfers at the same speeds with the backside usb  2.0 ports. And maybe the whole automounting will work on the backside ports without my workarrounds

  • Mijzelf
    Mijzelf Posts: 2,598  Guru Member
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    it was about 53MB/s which is  actualy within USB2.0 specs

    That is USB3 speed. An USB2 disk never exceeds ~25MB/sec. Maybe because the 480Mbit is half duplex.

  • gotjee
    gotjee Posts: 5  Freshman Member
    @Mijzelf on the backside-ports it was indeed a bit slower & also no auto-mount at boot so reverted that.
    Maybe I'll just have to leave it at this, was already looking if I can update the kernel  to something higher than 2.6.31.8 somehow as well , but don't find a lot of information :smile:
  • Mijzelf
    Mijzelf Posts: 2,598  Guru Member
    First Anniversary 10 Comments Friend Collector First Answer
    Unless you are building from scratch, your options are Arch, Debian, or OpenWrt.
  • May I attach my problem to this thread? I hav the same problem as @gotjee; I have a WD connected in the usb port, and every time I boot the NAS (a NSA325-v2), it doesn't mount it until I enter configuration page -> shared items; I have done what he suggested (used the cron deamon from the tweaks package and added
    @reboot sleep 30 && /bin/mkdir e-data/frontUSB && /bin/mount /dev/sdc /e-data/frontUSB

    (just put there, don't really understand how it works), but the same issue still happens when I boot the NAS.

    Could you please help me?
  • Mijzelf
    Mijzelf Posts: 2,598  Guru Member
    First Anniversary 10 Comments Friend Collector First Answer
    /dev/sdc is probably not the devicenode of the partition. Have a look with
    cat /proc/mounts
    when the disk is mounted to see which devicenode is mounted on /e-data/<something>

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