For years, a small Asustor NAS quietly did its job at the centre of my home network. It stored the data that mattered, served it reliably, and asked for very little in return. Then, as happens to so much consumer hardware, the vendor decided it was done with the model. No more firmware updates, no more security patches — just a device that still worked perfectly well but had been quietly abandoned by the company that made it.
An unpatchable NAS
For a box whose entire purpose is to hold your data, that abandonment isn’t a minor inconvenience; it’s a security problem. A NAS sits at a privileged position on the network, often with services exposed and always with the crown jewels on its disks. Running one on firmware and software that will never again receive a patch means accumulating known vulnerabilities with no way to close them. When I looked under the hood, the situation was worse than I expected: the thing was running Linux 3.12.20 — a kernel released back in 2014. An operating system frozen a decade in the past, with every vulnerability discovered since baked in and permanent.
Building the replacement
The responsible move was to replace it, and I wanted to do so on my own terms this time. Rather than buy another sealed appliance and start the same countdown to obsolescence, I built my own box: a Jonsbo N3 eight-bay case built around a CWWK Q670 Mini-ITX board — LGA1700, carrying an Intel Core i5-13500, a maxed-out 96 GB of RAM, and a pair of 2 TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe drives, with eight SATA bays and 2.5-gigabit networking — running Proxmox as the hypervisor and OpenMediaVault as a VM on top. Mainline kernel, standard packages, no vendor gatekeeping: ordinary PC parts I actually own, that I can keep patched for as long as I care to run them. Because it shares living space rather than sitting in a rack somewhere, I also made it quiet: the stock Intel cooler gave way to a near-silent Noctua NH-L12 Ghost S1 Edition, and the case fan to a Noctua NF-A9 PWM. The N3 itself deserves a word of praise: it was my first experience with a Jonsbo case, and it’s a genuinely thoughtful piece of small-form-factor design, a pleasure to build in, and a case I would recommend without hesitation. NASCompares’ coverage — both their YouTube review and their written review — was a great help in getting to know the case before I committed to it. As it happens, I put it together just before the steep rises in memory and storage prices, so maxing out the RAM and getting a pair of NVMe drives cost a good deal less then than the same parts would today.
Even the build had its hurdle, and it’s a telling one. The board shipped with a BIOS too old to recognise the 13th-generation i5, so it wouldn’t POST at all until I first dropped in a cheap 12th-generation i3-12100F, used it to flash the firmware, and then swapped the real CPU back in. But that’s precisely the point: it was an inconvenience with a known, documented fix, on a standard platform where a stopgap chip and a BIOS update were all it took. That firmware isn’t for the faint-hearted — a dense thicket of options — and coaxing the machine into sipping power rather than gulping it meant working through them carefully, not least enabling the CPU C-states the board leaves switched off by default. But every one of those knobs was mine to turn. The Asustor, as I was about to rediscover, offered no such door.
A second life for the old box
That left the question of what to do with the old Asustor. It was, physically, a perfectly good machine: working disk bays, working board, working power supply. Throwing it away felt wasteful, so I set out to give it a second life as a dedicated backup target running plain Debian. If I could get a supported, patchable OS onto it, an abandoned appliance could become a useful, secure part of the setup again — exactly the kind of small victory for sustainability and right-to-repair that free software is supposed to make possible.
It didn’t go to plan.
Reflashing it with Debian
The unit was an Asustor AS-608T — an Intel x86 machine rather than one of the ARM models, which is what made the exercise seem feasible in the first place. If it’s really just a PC in a NAS costume, the reasoning goes, it ought to boot an ordinary Debian. Mathias Fredriksson’s asustor_as-6xxt project exists precisely to do that, and it became my map for the attempt.
The catch with these boxes is that Asustor gives you almost nothing to work with at boot. There’s no usable video output — connect an HDMI cable and monitor and you get no signal at all — and no way to interrupt the boot sequence to reach a BIOS or boot menu; mashing ESC, F2 and DEL achieves precisely nothing. The machine simply powers on and marches straight into ADM, Asustor’s stock OS, itself sitting on that ancient Linux 3.12.20 kernel. Without a screen or a boot interrupt, the only way to see what the hardware is actually doing is to open it up and talk to it directly.
That meant a USB-to-serial adapter wired to the board’s UART header and picocom on a laptop at the other end, watching the boot messages scroll past over the serial console. It was the only way to get any visibility at all into a machine that would otherwise tell me nothing.
Despite all of that — the serial adapter, the wiring, and a good many evenings following the project’s notes — I couldn’t get a modern, bootable Debian to stick on the hardware. The serial console gave me visibility, but not control: the machine simply wouldn’t boot the custom Debian image I had written to USB. Whatever I tried, it ignored the external media and fell back to its stock firmware, stubbornly wedded to the OS it shipped with.
Off to recycling
The Asustor went to recycling. A physically sound computer, capable of years more service, ended up as e-waste — not because it had failed, but because the company that built it had stopped supporting it and had locked the platform down tightly enough that no one else could pick up where they left off.
Own your hardware
We talk about planned obsolescence as if it were mainly about batteries and slowing phones, but the more insidious version is the appliance you can’t re-home. When a vendor ends support for an open, standard platform, the community can often keep it alive. When they end support for a sealed one, the device’s useful life ends with their decision, and the landfill gets a little fuller. The contrast with my self-built replacement couldn’t be sharper: one box’s future is entirely in the vendor’s hands, the other’s is entirely in mine.
The lesson I have taken from it is simple, and it applies well beyond NAS boxes: when you buy hardware that holds your data, buy hardware you can actually own. Favour open, standard platforms you can keep patching yourself, and treat a sealed appliance’s convenience as a loan against a future expiry date — one the vendor gets to set, and you don’t.
