Recently, I ran into a problem with my old Buffalo LinkStation (LS-QVL) NAS: one of the hard drives failed, but I didn’t receive any email notification about it. That’s obviously a serious issue if you rely on these alerts to react in time — ideally before the second drive in the RAID also fails.

The problem with these older devices is often outdated firmware. In particular, the built-in software lacks support for modern TLS versions when sending emails. As a result, the NAS can no longer communicate with modern SMTP servers (such as Gmail or other up-to-date providers). On top of that, SSH access is not enabled by default.

To solve this, I put together a set of guides and scripts that help regain full control over the device and fix the notification system.

Enabling SSH Access#

The first step was to enable SSH access on the LinkStation. Since Buffalo doesn’t officially support this, acp_commander comes to the rescue. With a small script, you can activate the SSH service and set a password. This is a prerequisite for making deeper system changes.

Email Notifications with Modern TLS#

Because the built-in mail client of the LinkStation doesn’t support modern TLS, I used mailsend-go for the device’s ARM architecture. This makes it possible to send emails securely through any modern SMTP server.

A wrapper script (sendmail.sh) takes over the original mail-sending functionality. Once this is copied to the NAS, the LinkStation’s web interface can once again send test messages successfully — and more importantly, you’ll get reliable alerts when a hard drive fails.

You can find the full guide and all necessary scripts in my repository on Codeberg:

https://codeberg.org/cdm/ls-qvl

I hope this helps some of you keep your old hardware running safely a little longer!