I recently purchased the Lenovo ix2-dl NAS, b/c it was time to upgrade my storage capacity and I did not want to deal with my current setup anymore. My datahost box runs LVM on top of software RAID 1, on Slackware 10.2, with 5 drives in the machine :).
I was attracted to the Lenovo ix2-dl, b/c it is small, quiet, provides RAID 1 and costs $90 at Tigerdirect, which is significantly cheaper than any other NAS I came across.
This NAS box has a 1.5GHz ARM Feroceon 88FR131 processor, 256MB of RAM and runs LifeLine Linux, which is a distro developed by Iomega’s parent company EMC, specifically to power their NAS boxes.
The only concern I immediately had with the ix2-dl, was the lack of SSH access to the box. A Linux box w/o SSH access is extremely irritating, so I decided to research this further.
Enabling SSH Access
Turns out that there is a hidden Diagnostics page available in the web interface at /manage/diagnostics.html . This page allows the user to set an SSH port and root password. The catch is that the selected password is prefixed by the word ‘soho‘. So if you select ‘GOD’ as your password on the page, the actual password is ‘sohoGOD‘. You can change the password to whatever you want with the ‘passwd’ command.
Once you log in, you can work with the drives, software raid, Apache, NFS, etc. just like you are used to on any Linux box.
Credits
Most of the information was obtained from here: https://blog.liftsecurity.io/jon-lamendola
N1nja Hacks 
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Have you tried to enable full disk encryption on the user data partition and if so would you be willing to post an article on that?
Just found this and I love it! Thank you for sharing. I’m finally able to see why my primary NAS is so slow… Twonky was running and the load average was 4.5 and climbing. Killed all of the worthless cruft and now have a nice NFS NAS.
Hi, not sure if I’m in the right place. I want to know how to make the ix2-dl boot off a usb disk with Ubuntu on it. Any help would be great.. Thx
Thanks…nice post… really useful tip.
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This helped so much to download some directories with 10000+ files off of the nas (I don’t know how I managed to get it onto the NAS in the first place). Rather than waiting ages for a transfer over ftp, I could log in via ssh, tar the directory on the NAS itself, and use ftp to easily transfer the tar file to my machine.