QNAP TS-x53D

The QNAP TS-x53D is a series of two- and four-bay NAS appliances.

Hardware

Access UEFI interface

Tap Esc repeatedly during early boot with a display connected to the HDMI port, and it'll drop you into the interface once it's completed POST.

Installing Debian

You'll need a USB thumb drive to use as the boot and OS media, and another temporarily to write the installer to. It'll be slower to boot than using the onboard DOM, but you'll get to use all of the drive bays.

Install Debian stable from the netinst image, skipping configuration of the network interface. The debian-installer kernel is too old to include the driver, so custom firmware won't work.

Pre-Bullseye

Post-installation, install firmware-realtek and linux-image-5.10.0-0 from backports to get the network working. You'll need to download the *.deb packages on the first boot to enable networking. To ensure the packages are kept up to date afterwards:

cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/buster-backports.list
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ buster-backports main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ buster-backports non-free
EOF
apt update

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