virtual-sushi

My LinkStation Pro NAS is great for holding all my files, and really has made a small portion of my life more convenient. The only fly in the ointment is transferring huge files to/from it over my wireless network can take ages. Copying 8 gig of data would, as a relevant example, take me the best part of the rest of my evening. Maybe the USB ports at the back can be put to good use?

The LinkStation can’t be connected to a PC via USB (as far as I can see). It can, however, connect to other USB harddiscs. It does this to expand storage, but also gives us the ability to transfer data via the USB port - which is so much quicker. To do this, we’ll need to connect to the NAS via Telnet (the web interface doesn’t support using USB thumb-drives as a transfer medium), detect and manually mount the USB drive.

First, to telnet in we’ll need to enable Telnet on the NAS:

1. Download ACP Commander from here.
2. Use ACP Commander using the command java -jar acp_commander.jar -t <linkstation_ip>.
3. Telnet in. Look! It’s Linux!
4. The standard username is root, with no password. Note this gives you complete access to the software innards of the NAS. You don’t want to do anything rash, like delete random files, in this mode.
5. Poke about if you’re interested.

Now we need to find out where the USB thumb-drive is (obviously, your thumb-drive needs to be stuck into one of the ports at the back):

1. Run the command dmesg | grep -i "SCSI device". The output will look something like:

# dmesg | grep -i “SCSI device” SCSI device sdb: 16121856 512-byte hdwr sectors (8254 MB) SCSI device sdb: 16121856 512-byte hdwr sectors (8254 MB)

We’re interested in the bit that says sdb. Yours may be different (possibly sda). This is the location of the USB drive in the dev directory.

Okay, to mount it:

1. Create the directory /mnt/usbdrive to create our mount point.
2. Run the command mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/usbdrive.

The USB drive is now accessible from within Linux on the NAS. You can copy files to and from it using the standard Linux cp command.

Unmounting the USB drive can be done via umount /mnt/usbdrive.

(Thanks to this site, here, for all the info).