DISCLAIMER: As I said , I only run openlink so I can serve NFS (samba and netatalk are too slow for fullscreen video over 100Mbit). If I was running samba and/or appletalk I would probably not have had a problem.
That said: if you setup NFS on your linkstation, NEVER EVER EVER (ever) backup using the web frontend.
I’ve been backing up my other machines to the LS for a few months.
I got a fast/cheap/quiet/lovely Seagate 250Gb disk and thought I’d backup using the UI (openlink is a superset of the official firmware. I stupidly thought this would be ok.).
Plugged in the disk. It took the LS about an hour to build what looked like an ext2 filesystem on it.
I should have started running at that point.
The backup script on the LS is called do-backup.pl (I would upload a copy, but someone might stumble across it and I don’t want that on my conscience).
Whoever wrote it made the decision to allow clients read-only access to shares while they were being archived. Which would be cool, except the way they do that is essentially:
- chmod -R 555 $SHAREDIR
- cp -R $SHAREDIR /mnt/usbdisk/`date`
- chmod -R 777 $SHAREDIR
I’m paraphrasing. But only slightly. Key features are:
- it makes no attempt to remember/restore the old perms. This does horrible things to an NFS share. I’m (charitably) assuming it doesn’t fuck up samba/appletalk too badly.
- every file on the share is made executable before it even does anything (’chmod ugo-w -R …’ would have the same effect and be slightly less stupid)
- every file in the share is world writable when it completes
- cp??? (Google returns patches that at least use rsync)
- this is a CGI. The only user feedback is a blinkenlight on the USB disk
(I’m using 50Gb, it was 45 minutes in before I sshed to see what was going on) - Samba and Appletalk support readonly shares (NFS does too, but I forgive that as it’s not part of openlink)
This rant is mainly due to the death of the eMac the next morning1. I was left with a backup of the LS I didn’t trust and a ‘good copy’ of all our digital photos that had been tampered with. It took a lot of work I could really have done without to make sure that the permissions were sane.
What’s really to blame2 is shitty filesystems that force developers to hack around their lack of features (snapshots in this case). I’ll go into more detail when I’ve calmed down 
The Linkstation is still a great piece of kit as far as it goes.
In my case, it’s gone on amazon marketplace.
1 yes, I’m aware of the repair program . No, my serial number isn’t in the list.
2 no. not the guy who puts important things on firmware written by people who run off with paypal donations . definitely the filesystem. definitely.