adoll's Journal: Enabling rsync on Iomega StorCenter

Recently bought an Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 for our small office. I've got three Linux machines that I want to synchronize to this device using rsync.

I set the machine up with security, passwords, and so on. Using the web control panel, enabled that "rsync" option (on "Settings|Network Services" page), but that actually didn't do anything -- I get the following:

ssh: connect to host 192.168.1.107 port 22: Connection refused
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(601) [sender=3.0.7]

So the server is clearly not working. In reality, the SSH port is closed which blocks default rsync connections.

I found two blog posts that expose what's happening.

First, unfortunately, was offline when I tried to connect to it.
http://vuksan.com/blog/2010/04/28/customizing-iomega-storcenter-ix4-200d-with-ipkg/

Fortunately the google cache worked, and the meat of the vuksan.com post explains how to access the device. First, there is a secret support page on the machine that you access by your web browser. In this example, my device's IP address is 192.168.1.107; yours could be different so adjust as necessary. The support page is https://192.168.1.107/support.html . On this page there is a button for "Support Access". Click that, enable "Allow remote access for support (SSH and SFTP)" and click "Apply". Now you can ssh as root to the device like this from your computer:
ssh root@192.168.1.107
The password will be your admin password with the letters "soho" appended. So if your admin password was 'booger', then your root ssh password will be 'sohobooger'. That gets you into the device remotely.

You can stop at this point if you are happy with doing rsync as the root user. You would use something like:

rsync -auvz . root@192.168.1.107:/public/my_folder/ --dry-run

But I want to have non-root access for some user accounts. So on to the next blog post.

Second blog post is here: http://www.krausam.de/?p=33
This post explains how to modify the configuration files on the server to enable rsync by changing files in the /etc/init.d/ directory.

One note, this model of StorCenter has a slightly different naming scheme than the one in Krausam.de. The file you need to modify is /etc/init.d/sshd . But it is read-only by default, so you have to set it to read-write (root user only), then modify lines 37, 38, 43, and 44 by removing the "#" (as described in Krausam.de).

Reboot the machine and now user accounts should work. If they don't on the first try, perhaps try setting them to 'admin' accounts.

Only root account works

[adoll]

Good news: rsync works as root.

Bad news: After numerous reboots and combinations of user passwords, I'm still only able to rsync using the root account. Next step will be to dig through the user permissions in the device (ssh as root and play with combinations of groups and maybe the settings for ssh in the /etc directory).