I have the NAS 220 an have read and posted my own info on the NAS randomly locking up. Seeing as how the last firmware update didn't resolve the random NAS lockups, I have come up with a method to reboot the NAS nightly.
This is a clean reboot of the NAS.
Disclaimer: Use this at your own risk. I WILL NOT be held responsible if you bust your gear. I am posting this as the frustration level with this unit appears to be high for not only myself but a lot of others.
What I did was go to:
http://www.noerenberg.de/hajo/pub/ and download the custom firmware that will enable SSH on the NAS. The directions are here:
http://www.noerenberg.de/hajo/pub/seagate-blackarmor-nas.txt
This firmware only enables SSH, it appears to do nothing else to the system.
I did steps 1 and 2 under:
1. Enable SSH on the Seagate Blackarmor 220 NAS - the easy way
the rest of the document is for doing other things to your NAS which for this I don't care about.
Once I enabled SSH and changed my root password I downloaded plink.exe from:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
I put that file in C:\Windows\System32 so it was easy to call.
I then created a batch file with the following in it:
plink -ssh -pw My_root_Password -noagent root@My_NAS_IP reboot
I saved the batch file to a directory and setup a scheduled task within windows to run this nightly at 11:30pm.
In my case I use a program called FTPSync.exe (freeware) to sync a few directoriers on 2 laptops for backup purposes. It is fast and light weight. In my reboot batch file I have a few lines that check for the running existence on FTPSync.exe on the 2 laptops I run it on and if one or both are running it, the reboot is skipped for that night. If both are clean the reboot command is executed and the NAS does a clean shutdown and restart.
In looking at the logs for the NAS after a lockup I believe the issue revolves around the S.M.A.R.T software used to check the drives. I have seen this in the logs as the last entries before it heads south:
Jun 25 14:48:24 BA-254E7F daemon.alert wixLog[1431]: check_volume_status - wixGetVolumeState(volume1) Operation not permitted
Jun 25 14:56:40 BA-254E7F daemon.alert wixEvent[1407]: HDD SMART - HDD 1 SMART Health Status: Failed.
Jun 25 15:01:20 BA-254E7F daemon.alert wixEvent[1407]: HDD SMART - HDD 2 SMART Health Status: Failed.
A hard reboot of the NAS clears it and the system is functional again. I then run a disk check on them and they both pass.
I suspect there may be a memory leak in this program as I have not had an issue with lockups since the nightly reboot setup a few weeks ago.
I hope this helps anyone as frustrated as I am with this. I also hope some of this info gets passed over to the Dev guys at Seagate. One suggestion I would like to make for the developers is please make the log files accessable via the web page. I would not have needed to apply a custom firmware to enable SSH if it were.
Mike...
