Yeah it's not great.

I have a TVS-471 with drives in all four bays, 2x mirrored RAID 1 groups combined into a single storage pool.

Woke up a few days ago, couldn't see any of my services running. Checked my router, my NAS didn't appear to be connected. Weird. Lights around the ethernet ports that are usually blinky - no blinky. And a very unpleasant smell coming from the back of the NAS...

Started doing some digging. It powers on fine, and using the small front panel display, I can see that it's responsive. I'm able to connect an HDMI monitor and keyboard and access the terminal locally. No QTS, just the terminal.

Ran ip link and... nada. Was expecting to see eth0, eth1, etc. but only the local loopback (lo) appears in the list. Great.

So as far as I can tell, my network interfaces are just completely gone. I'd like to figure out a way to keep using the server, and from my POV I have a few options:

1. Abandon hardline and use a wireless card. I have an older USB Wi-fi adapter laying around. Got that connected, and the NAS detects it fine, assigns it wlan0. Was able to run an SSID scan, and my wireless network appeared. Did a bunch of reading and got familiar building the wpa_supplicant.conf file. But when I try to connect, no luck, it throws an ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: Invalid argument error. Kinda got stuck here. Tried setting up an open guest wi-fi network with no security, and still not able to connect - throws the same error.

2. I have a USB to ethernet adaptor as well - tried that, the server sees a USB device, but doesn't recognize it as a network interface. Just to make sure my hardware was good, I popped an Ubuntu live USB into the NAS and booted up in the Ubuntu GUI. Wi-fi stick and USB adapter both work great here. So all of this is just a software issue getting the QNAP distro to talk to my hardware properly.

3. I could purchase a PCIE network card with another ethernet port if I can't get options 1 and 2 to work.

If I'm not able to get this sad box networking again, then how do I go about accessing all my files?

1. I could connect an external USB HDD and shuttle files off the NAS. But we'd need a 14TB drive to get everything... $$

2. I could try and mount my storage pool on another distro (Ubuntu live USB like I mentioned earlier) but the small amount of Googling I've done on this leads me to believe that it's going to be very unlikely I'll be able to mount the storage pool that QNAP built.

3. I could just buy a new QNAP box and move the disks over. Theoretically they should come right back up.

This small spot of piss has caused me no small amount of consternation. Any thoughts, or just words of solidarity?

It's a good thing I like my cat.