How To Access Netgear Stora Locally

[Roshan Fried]

Irealised the other day that there is absolutely no way to get flash working any more since Microsoft has time-bombed usage. None of the work-arounds I googled worked. I spent a whole day on this issue attempting to avoid dumping the two unusued storas.

Yes I'm aware you can attempt to flash the firmware with different firmware, but it is difficult and requires tools that most poeple won't have, and electronics knowledge that most people also won't have. Then the final system is much less powerful than the original software included anyway.

3. Search for and download an old version of Adobe Flash Player (I found an old version of Version 10 - it's not too hard. *DO THIS ON YOUR VIRTUAL MACHINE YOU INSTALLED WINDOWS 7 OR EARLIER ON - SO THAT IF YOU DOWNLOAD A VIRUS OR SOMETHING YOU CAN SIMPLY START AGAIN* - Repeat - do not download any of the obsolete unsupported software like Flash Player on your every-day pc from a site you don't know and that isn't secure. - INSTALL THE FLASH PLAYER ON YOUR VIRTUAL MACHINE (windows 7 or whatever you installed)

4. On your normal PC, GO TO YOUR ROUTER - look up your LAN and find the IP address of your stora. *TOP TIP: Find the MAC address on the back of your stora and set your router to assign a static IP to the MAC address of your STORA to ensure you know what the IP address is.

5. On the vritual PC, Start the included internet explorer and navigate to your STORA IP address and then you'll be met with the familiar interface - log in and you're all good to set it back up in the Preferences section!

To access and use your stora, do so from your every-day PC by using Windows Explorer. You need to enable SMB1.0 (google search how to do this, it's easy) and then you should be able to find it in your network devices section. Otherwise type "RUN" into your cortana search (use the run command) and then type \\x.x.x.x (where x.x.x.x is the IP your stora) and then enter the credentials for your stora (you can set them up in the Preferences section of the web interface on your virtual machine) and then map the network drive and you're good to go.

You should be able to access the GUI locally using the IP address of the Stora. Have you tried using the resource CD on setting up your Stora? if you need to set it up again, it will need internet connection. However, Stora mystora.com has been taken down last April 01, 2020.

Seems a waste, as it is fully functional and I am sure there must be some way of reflashing it with some generic software like FreeNAS to get it to work standalone. I have no interest of the MyStora application anyway, just want to use it as backup on my own Wifi network for local backup and storage.

Hi,

what you are saying is ridiculous: my device works perfectly and because it needs an hard reset it becomes a brick only because Netgear decides to close the website.

There would be legal action!

So I dug out my old iPad, charged the battery, booted it up and....Hey presto! The app still works. I now have limited access to my Stora using my old iPad. I can see all the content but can't do anything much with it. Haven't figured out how to move stuff to my new chosen storage platform which is a Synology NAS but at least I can see the files and open them.

Just come back to this same problem after a period of illness and a house move - not only has my NetGear Stora denied access except for read-only music files via SONOS, but my ReadyNas NV+ gone the same way. Both bits of hardware are working file - it just seems to be the lack of a driver and some management software. The fact that NetGear have just walked away from these NAS product stinks, and I won't be buying anything else from them - not even switches even though they got those right!

So now I have a perfectly functional NAS that has been EOL'd with little thought or concern about what customers will do with their files. It's almost like they are being paid to help shunt people to cloud services for reliability because I am reluctant to have to keep purchasing new NAS hardware if they are going to keep retiring stuff that works well. And with Fry's being closed I can't really go kick the tires of new NAS options and have to go with Amazon reviews which are, and this is charitable, suspect by nature.

The Netgear Stora is a simple NAS system that allows anyone, even with no tech knowledge, to set up a simple network attached home RAID system. I plugged it in, slapped in a second hard drive, pushed the power button, and copied over my files. It was completely up and running within a few minutes. The Netgear Stora provided me an easy hot-swappable RAID system, but I wanted much more. I knew it was a fully functional, stand-alone, low-power linux server. The obvious next step was to root it.

Gaining root access on the Netgear Stora is amazingly easy. The first thing you need to do is get your product key. There is one located on the bottom of the device and one on the cd that came with it. Mine (for whatever reason) didn't match. For me the one on the Netgear Stora install CD was the correct one to use. This may not always be the case so try both.

Now that you have your Stora product id all you need to do is login via SSH using any user you have setup on your stora that has administrator access (in the web interface). However, if you just use the user name as is you won't be allowed access. Instead you have to add "_hipserv2_netgear_XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX" after the user name (replace the X's with your actual product key). For my example I will use my name Lenny as the user name and all X's for the product key. Any user with the administrator access flagged in the Netgear Stora web panel will have the ability to use the sudo command to gain root access.

From what I can tell this is just a lame attempt by the developers to keep the general public form being able to shell into the device while still allowing themselves to get in for debugging / testing. It looks like the distribution of linux packaged with the Netgear Stora is shipped with a custom SSH server that appends a string including the product keys to the authorized user list.

Maybe you can assist me. I just got a Stora and had it set up. I could not add any users except the admin. In the OpenStora forum it stated the issue may be Access Patrol Service. So I tried the final step as instructed.

Well i messed up and missed a whole section. Now I get a constant blinking blue power light, any recommendations on how to correct this. I cant get into the SSH or even an ip address. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Does anyone know how to use the Stora for just a plain and simple network drive without all the stora crap?

I cant log into my stora as I cant remember my username and password and when I try to register it during the setup with the name I thought I gave it its incorrect.

Stora is sold as a cheap home NAS, with mixed reviews. What makes it interesting to us is that the hardware is one of the best in its price range (1Ghz, 2 drive bays etc.) and because it runs (open source) Red Hat Linux; with some time and this wiki you can fix some of these limitations and bugs, and make it do a lot of things that it can't do "out of the box".

1) If you want Easy Root Access you need to register the first user account online before you can SSH in (telnet or tftp methods below can be used without registration)

2) If you ever need to do Stora Recovery

and obviously 3) if you use any of the Stora's optional online services (Flickr etc. integration)!

Basically: No, in normal use the Stora is capable of authenticating you on its own, even though by default it redirects you through mystora.com. To fix this see Disable mystora.com redirection. Then you will be able login to the web interface without internet access or if the web site is down.

Yes, you need Easy Root Access, then read Changing User Limit. There is then no hard limit (128MB RAM is more likely to become an issue than the 1Ghz CPU). You can also add users via the command line with the normal RedHat linux tools (Users added this way will not appear in web interface).

You can do almost anything you would expect a NAS to do even with the stock (original) firmware, but you will need to learn some linux CLI (command line interface) tools because we don't have a GUI (graphical) interface replacement that covers all the possible new options. For a good collection of suitable ARM binaries, see -linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/stable

Real world speeds seem to be in the 20MB-30MB/s range for reads and writes over gigabit networks (copying a single large file). This depends on factors such as hard drive speed, network, system load, file sizes etc. Jumbo frames do not appear to be supported so this may be a limiting factor.

Hard drive(s) are very easy to change, both physically (just slide off front panel and pull lever) and because Stora doesn't use hard drive for its OS (256MB flashram). Almost any SATA 3.5" drive should work including 4k advanced sector 2TB+ drives. Usually it's just a case of swapping the drive and rebooting, then formatting the new drive (web frontend or with root commands). By default only /home and /tmp are mounted to the hard drive, but take care if you have linked any system directories.

RAM is not upgradeable. There is 128MB on board.

You can add an internal USB Hub for more USB devices.

By default the Stora will create a RAID1 mirror (even if you only insert 1 drive; it creates a degraded mirror, waits for another drive of equal or greater capacity). JBOD support was added in firmware 2.x. It's also possible via root access to create a RAID0 array or just mount the drives separately. There are some bugs you may need to fix though, e.g. Fixing spindown not working on JBOD setup. Be sure to backup all your data in /home before changing drive configuration.

First of all you must know that Stora mounts your USB attached hard drive inside the FamilyLibrary, it creates a new directory named with the label of the inserted disk, also, you need to have at least one SATA drive attached inside the Stora for the USB mount to work.

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