0Managing a Qnap NAS power on and off from home assistant

I have a QNAP NAS that I use for backups. It only needs to run once a week so the rest of the time it’s bet­ter for it to be off to save power (around 40–50W!). After some fid­dling I man­aged to achieve what I needed via home assist­ant. Here’s how…

Getting Qnap ready to talk to HA

Install Putty (inc putty­gen) and then use putty-gen to gen­er­ate a 2048-bit RSA pub­lic-private key pair
Copy the both to your home assist­ance config/.ssh folder (cre­ate it if it does­n’t exist)
Open the PUBLIC key in a text edit­or (e.g. Notepad++)
Now log in to the Qnap
Cre­ate a second admin user on the QNAP with a nice long com­plex pass­word. This account unfor­tu­nately does need to be an admin account not just a reg­u­lar user (in order to read the net­work band­width usage)
Click on your user­name at the top right
Select “login and secur­ity” from the drop-down menu
Select the “SSH Keys” tab
Click the blue link to “SSH Con­nec­tion” which will open the con­trol pan­el at the right place
Tick “allow SSH con­nec­tion” and if you wish to change the port (I usu­ally do) and click apply
Close the con­trol pan­el and go back to the “login and secur­ity” window
Click the blue text “access permissions”
Tick the box next to the new user­name to allow it.
Log out of the qnap
Log into the Qnap as the new user
Click on your user­name at the top right
Select “login and secur­ity” from the drop-down menu
Select the “SSH Keys” tab
Click “add”
Copy and paste the whole con­tents of the PUBLIC key you opened earli­er and then click “add”

Initial HA setup

Now open your home assist­ant configuration.yaml and at the bot­tom add the fol­low­ing line
shell_command:
shutdown_qnap: !secret SSH_Qnap_Command
Now open secrets.yaml (cre­ate it if it does­n’t exist) and add the fol­low­ing, repla­cing the sec­tions in curly brack­ets with your ssh port (22 unless you changed it), qnap user­name that you cre­ated, the IP of the qnap, and the long ugly pass­word you cre­ated for the new qnap suer
SSH_Qnap_Command: ssh -i /config/.ssh/id_rsa -o 'StrictHostKeyChecking=no' -p {ssh port} {qnap username}@{qnap ip address} 'echo -e "{qnap password}" | sudo -S poweroff'
Now load home assistant
Go to set­tings -> devices & ser­vices -> add integration
Search for QNAP
Fol­low the wiz­ard and enter the IP, user­name and pass­word needed to access your qnap (the new account you cre­ated on the qnap)
This should cre­ate a Qnap device with sev­er­al entit­ies. There may be a num­ber of dis­abled entities.
Check if the eth0 (and/or eth1 etc) entit­ies are enabled or dis­abled. If they are dis­abled enable the ones you need and make sure after a minute or so they pop­u­late cor­rectly. Also check what units they are using (e.g. mb/sec or kb/sec)

Creating an HA automation to put inactive qnap to sleep

In HA go to ‘set­tings’ -> ‘auto­ma­tions & scenes’ and click “cre­ate automation”
Cre­ate from blank (don’t use a template)
Once in the auto­ma­tion, click on the 3 ver­tic­al dots at the top right and click “edit in yaml”
Paste the fol­low­ing code, edit­ing to suit where needed. Change ‘sensor.garage_qnap_eth0_download’ to the eth­er­net usage entity you need. I have used activ­ity below 0.5mb/sec as an indic­a­tion that the device is no longer run­ning any act­ive tasks. Note the action matches the name we added earli­er to configuration.yaml
alias: Put Qnap NAS to sleep
description: >-
When inactive for 60mins put Qnap to sleep. It can be woken via WOL and wakes
on schedule at 11.50pm on Sunday for Monday AM backup routines
triggers:
- trigger: numeric_state
entity_id:
- sensor.garage_qnap_eth0_download
for:
hours: 1
minutes: 0
seconds: 0
below: 0.5
conditions: []
actions:
- data: {}
action: shell_command.shutdown_qnap
mode: single

Create a binary sensor to detect if the qnap is awake

In HA go to set­tings -> Devices & ser­vices and click “add integration”
Search for ping (or you can use nmap if you know what you’re doing)
Enter the IP of the NAS and give it the name “qnap nas” (which will cre­ate the entity as ‘binary_sensor.qnap_nas’ which we use in the switch in the next step)

Create HA switch to wake and sleep the qnap

I did this with yaml, but it can now be done via the GUI…
To do it via the GUI…
In HA go to set­tings -> devices and services
click on the “help­ers” tab.
Click “cre­ate help­er” and scroll down to “tem­plate”
Pop­u­late the sec­tions using the inform­a­tion in the yaml below
Or to do it with YAML…
Open configuration.yaml and look for the “tem­plate” sec­tion. If there isn’t one cre­ate one with the fol­low­ing. If there is one then skip this step
template: !include template.yaml
Now open template.yaml and add the fol­low­ing code (OR add this code in configuration.yaml dir­ectly below the tem­plate sec­tion if there is no template.yaml file)
Note you will need to know the MAC address of the qnap inter­face that has WOL, and you should also gen­er­ate a unique guid using a free online guid generator
- switch:
- default_entity_id: switch.switch_qnap
state: "{% if is_state('binary_sensor.qnap_nas', 'on') %}On{% else %}Asleep{% endif %}"
name: QNap NAS
unique_id: "{uuid here}"
turn_on:
service: wake_on_lan.send_magic_packet
data:
mac: "{qnap MAC address here}"
turn_off:
service: shell_command.shutdown_qnap
You can now add this switch to any dash­board and it will show if the qnap is on and will allow you to turn the qnap on or off. Note that the qnap does take a minute or so to shut­down and sev­er­al minutes to boot up.

Setting a wake schedule on the NAS

I use a wake sched­ule to wake my NAS before my backups run. The backups start as Sunday ticks over into Monday (i.e. at 00:00 on Monday morning)
Log into the NAS with your main admin user
Open the ‘con­trol pan­el’ and then go to Sys­tem -> Power
Select the WoL tab and make sure WoL is enabled
then go to the power sched­ule tab
Tick “enable schedule”
click the icon in the “action” tab of the exist­ing entry (or cre­ate one if there isn’t an entry)
Select “turn on the serv­er” and set it to run every sunday at 23:50 (which gives the device 10 mins to boot up which should be sufficient)
In case HA isn’t work­ing for some reas­on I also like to have a fall-back on the NAS to send it back to sleep even­tu­ally, on the assump­tion my backup jobs wont take more than 23 hours (they nev­er get close to this)
Cre­ate a second sched­ule to shut­down the serv­er at 23:00 every day (I use every day so it goes back to sleep even if I woke it up manu­ally and HA isn’t work­ing to put it back to sleep)