Comments on: Inside the Linksys NSS4000

By: jake@voipcitadel.com

jake@voipcitadel.com — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:17:00 +0000

I wonder if this could be turned into an asterisk appliance box for a local storage system/low use PBX.

Interesting….

By: ldillon

ldillon — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:49:26 +0000

There seems to be some checking going on — I was unable to export / via NFS.

By: ldillon

ldillon — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 21:45:38 +0000

I believe I have a way to gain root access without opening the case.
If you backup the config to a USB drive, you get access to many critical system files in /etc

From here you can:
1. add a UID 0 account to passwd and shadow
2. edit exports to share / writeable (no_root_squash)
3. do basically the same thing to smb.conf
4. edit iptables to allow ssh
5. edit root’s crontab to run arbitrary commands

Not sure home to start ssh yet, but should be doable once you can browse the filesystem.

You need to do this with a “8 bit clean” editor (not notepad). I use vim under Windows.

Then remake the config.NAS._blah_.tar.gz and restore.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t work. If the above technique doesn’t make sense to you, I wouldn’t recommend trying it.

By: hobbes

hobbes — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 13:00:59 +0000

I have experienced the same symptoms on my NSS 6000 as daniellysy – after reboot, all shares on one of 2 volumes did not appear again, even after a fresh reboot. A very simple action solved the problem for me: After creating a new, empty share on the same volume, all the other shared reappeared, were accessible from clients and contained all the data. Firmware is 1.16.

By: ghesoide

ghesoide — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:32:25 +0000

hi! one of my customer has the same problem of daniellysy from Poland (shares on NSS6000 disappeared); I would like to know if there’s a workaround to this issue and if daniellysy have fixed it! thanks

By: Terry Kennedy

Terry Kennedy — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:01:31 +0000

It sounds as though this problem should be covered by Linksys support as it would seem to be caused by a bug in their software.

Depending on whether you have your data backed up somewhere else, you could try updating the firmware (I’m not sure that does anything if you’re already at the latest version).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as though the NSS has a “reset to factory defaults” that will help you – the front-panel reset button only resets the networking configuration, and the web interface allows resetting everything else. But from what you say, the web interface probably isn’t running.

There is a factorydefaults.tar.gz file in /factorydefaults on the NSS, which does contain a copy of the file you’re looking for. There are also various backup files (all ending in .nasbak) in /linusrwfs/etc, though I don’t think they’ll help in this case.

I’m sending some additional information to you via email.

By: michel2k

michel2k — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:26:02 +0000

Hi Terry. My NSS4000 won’t work after a recovery of config files. I builded the console cable to read the messages from the startup:

/etc/init.d/S84httpds: line 18: /etc/global.conf: No such file or directory
/etc/init.d/S85httpd: line 18: /etc/global.conf: No such file or directory
/etc/init.d/S90samba: line 32: /etc/global.conf: No such file or directory

/etc/global.conf is a symbolic link to Global-NSS4000.conf. Global-NSS4000.conf does not exist anymore. I tried booting the kernel in single mode but it does not mount /dev and /etc. It is impossible for me to change to root password, since i cannot boot additional drives. (

Any ideas?

By: Terry Kennedy

Terry Kennedy — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:27:09 +0000

I’ve sent you an email with some other ideas. As I said above and in that email, I’d recommend against making any config changes to the NSS until you are able to recover your data.

By: daniellysy

daniellysy — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:18:39 +0000

Thanks very much, your feedback is important to me. Unfortunatly Linksys not offers pay-per-case support in Poland, there is only call center. And nobody in Linksys don’t have any tools to connect to device in other way than by share. I don’t believe in this. You shuld teach this guys . So I will try to restore to factory defaults my NSS6000 and see is this change something.

By: Terry Kennedy

Terry Kennedy — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:29:46 +0000

I’m sorry, but the changes I made to the system were on a running NSS6000. I’ve never tried building a custom firmware update with the changes pre-applied and I don’t know if it is possible.

Even if you enable SSH, you’ll want root access which you won’t get without either a serial console or by doing some tricks with backing up / restoring the config from a USB drive.

I would *STRONGLY* advise you to not try changing any settings on the NSS until you have recovered your data.

If you can’t get support from Linksys (I thought they offered premium pay-per-case support) I think your best bet would be to set up the serial console as described in my post. You don’t need to change any software settings to boot in single-user mode as root. You should then be able to mount the filesystem(s) with your data (if they are un-damaged) and (for example) FTP the data to another system.

It sounds like you don’t have the in-house experience to do this – perhaps there is someone in your area that could assist you? As the hardware serial port is similar to that on the Linksys NSLU2, you might try asking in that community if there is someone near you who could assist: http://www.nslu2-linux.org