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Attached USB Device as iSCSI volume
Is it possible to attach a USB device to a ReadyNAS Pro or ReadyNAS RN102 and create an iSCSI volume from that? I would like to attach an external USB 3.0 drive that is encrypted with bitlocker t...
What you could do is create a VHD file encrypted with bit locker, and host that on the NAS - either on an internal volume or on the USB drive. If the USB drive was formatted as NTFS, that would have a similar effect (you could access the VHD directly from a Windows PC by attaching the USB drive to the PC, or via the NAS).
Decryption of the VHD is done in the PC client (to the NAS it is just a big file).
http://www.howtogeek.com/193013/how-to-create-an-encrypted-container-file-with-bitlocker-on-windows/ shows how to make the encrypted vhd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBhej67wD98 shows how to mount it from a network share.
One caveat - VHD support requires Windows professional, enterprise, or ultimate.
What you could do is create a VHD file encrypted with bit locker, and host that on the NAS - either on an internal volume or on the USB drive. If the USB drive was formatted as NTFS, that would have a similar effect (you could access the VHD directly from a Windows PC by attaching the USB drive to the PC, or via the NAS).
Decryption of the VHD is done in the PC client (to the NAS it is just a big file).
http://www.howtogeek.com/193013/how-to-create-an-encrypted-container-file-with-bitlocker-on-windows/ shows how to make the encrypted vhd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBhej67wD98 shows how to mount it from a network share.
One caveat - VHD support requires Windows professional, enterprise, or ultimate.
Stephen, if I have created a VHD file encrypted with bitlocker that is hosted on the NAS through USB, how can i back up to that VHD?
For instance, if I attach the VHD from a windows client, it appears as local drive F:
If I wanted to Rsync to that USB Drive, what would the file path be?
It's a little confusing.
If you could assist I would be grateful.
Thank you.
VHD (virtual disk) is similar to iSCSI. You mount the VHD from the PC (as I guess you have done). Then you access it just like a regular drive from the PC.
But like iSCSI that's pretty much all you can do. The VHD file is opaque to the NAS. And of course since it is client-side encrypted, only clients with the key can decrypt it.
If that is not the behavior you wanted/expected, perhaps you should tell us more about what you want to do with the disk..
I did state what I wanted to do with the disk.
"The goal of this would be to unlock a bitlocker encrypted drive that is attached to the NAS via USB for backups."
I just want to backup to an encrypted USB drive, preferably using RSYNC or some other "intelligent" backup protocol, without having to have a PC running all the time, but it looks like I might have to use a different method. The encryption doesn't have to be bitlocker, but I don't know of any other external disk encryption that's even close to compatible with the NAS.
There is a program called Dislocker that allows linux based systems to mount bitlocker encrypted drives that can be found here http://www.hsc.fr/ressources/outils/dislocker/
I would take a swing at installing it; however, there isn't very much information about which flavor of linux that NAS runs, and that leaves me in a position where I'm not even sure if it is possible to install that program because of this.
Thanks for the help Stephen. I do appreciate it.
SuperNASman wrote:
I did state what I wanted to do with the disk.
"The goal of this would be to unlock a bitlocker encrypted drive that is attached to the NAS via USB for backups."
I was interpreting that as backing up from a PC, not from Frontview. So the use case would be to ensure that sensitve info can't be read if someone hacks the NAS. I was assuming that since you are specifically thinking about bitlocker, which is Windows only.
Extending the drive encryption used by the NAS to the USB drives is a different use case, and VHD won't help you there.
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