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The problem with these older devices is often outdated firmware.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.