Death Inc

This one is probably directed at Bohica, but anyone with experience please feel free to help a brother out!

As of yesterday morning my NAS is not working as it should.

it takes about 10 minutes to load the log in page, and another 10-30 minutes to log in. By the time I get in, everything is unresponsive, i.e. the Control Panel takes about 10 minutes to become usable (and as soon as I click on another link, it takes another 10 minutes to load).

shared drives are also unresponsive, both mapped drives on my laptop, and the libraries on my XBMC player.

I have reset the network config and admin password, which means I no longer have SSH access, as synology doesnt allow root access when no password is set. I cant change the admin password because:
a) it takes forever to get into DSM, and
b) when i get into change the password i get an error along the lines of "cannot connect to the network. CHeck your network settings"


I've also tried logging in with another account, and when I did I received a message "Cannot log in as disk space is full" (or something like that). Now I know the data drives arent full (there would be around 1TB free). Some googling has pointed toward the system partition being full, and the only way to see that is through SSH.... Which I cant get to.


Another interesting point: the synology wiki says you need to press the reset button down for four seconds, until you hear a beep for the networking and admin password to reset. When I do this, it takes another full minute between letting go of the button and the beep sounding...

I am lost and out of ideas.

Dex have you rebooted it?

multiple times.

did you change anything lately, like update firmware or add new drives?

havent updated the firmware in a while (couple months old)
it was working at 5am Tuesday morning, and then started having issues later in the day. I didn't have a chance to change anything.

fixed...

One of the disks was playing up I think. Took the disk out, and everything works perfectly. (Aside from the NAS now being in a degraded state with no disk redundancy)

Not sure why one disk would cause the whole NAS to play up though ?

What sort of raid does it use?

raid 5

there is the problem, raid 5. If you were in a World of Warcraft raid you would be fine. Next time, pony up, get in WoW and lose the real life friends and sex life, as its not needed.

Yeah RAID 5 uses all the Disks and stripes the data across all of them.
If one drive dies its gonna fuck up the whole thing.

How many disk NAS is it Dex if it is a 2 just use RAID 1 mirroring.

it is a 4 bay NAS..

RAID 5 is striped with distributed parity, so one disk failing does not cause the NAS not to work.
(As demonstrated when I took a disk out and the problem was fixed)

Sorry to ask, but does it not have an LED on the front that would indicate a fault with the HDD ? That way you would have a rough idea something was wrong ?

it does have an LED for each HDD, but there was no fault showing with any of the drives.
THe last time a drive failed, the LED was flashing orange, and the NAS was beeping.

This time everything was healthy, which is why it took me so long to figure it out.

But then you are a bit slow, and look a lot like Sloth from the Goonies...
(http://filmbalaya.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/sloth_goonies.jpg)

Some technical feed back.

4 drives in raid 5 are active even if one is only the spare.
If a drive is in the beginning stages of failure, array's will be impacted.

The data in your case was rather secured (belonging to a raid 5 array), but all drives are as one, if one has issues they all have issues.

The drives in the array can only operate as quick as the slowest.

The biggest issue I have with client and their raids at any stage of failure, is the constant restarting trying to ride a 2 legged goat, it isn't going to fix anythin

Did you jump into storage manager at all?