Recent Linux on the Verbatim Gigabit NAS
(Last boot on 2026-02-02 using kernel v6.12.68 and full OpenWrt)

Verbatim Gigabit NAS

Obviously to do this at your own risk but given how old this NAS is and how many security bugs and performance bottlenecks the old kernel has, what choice do you really have...

The firmware/OS on the machine installed into flash memory. The hard drives do not contain any operating system components.

What you want for a NAS is not a default OpenWrt build. What differs from upstream OpenWrt is the following:

• LuCI is installed (OK this is usually default with OpenWrt images...)
• ksmbd is installed, as well as ksmbd-luci for file sharing
• hdparm is installed to set up spindown of the drive

Here are my tested images per 2026-02-02, built from a snapshot upstream OpenWrt base:

• openwrt-gemini-generic-verbatim_s08v1901_d1-squashfs-factory.bin - this can be used to update the factory firmware to OpenWrt, as is custom. In practice this is a tailored .tar.gz file which will be expanded and three different parts flashed to the "Kern", "Ramdisk" and "Application" partitions. After installing this, you should use sysupgrade for any subsequent updates, whether from here or to the official OpenWrt releases. Use this from the firmware update menu in the Verbatim stock firmware. I had to wait a long time and then the drive powered down. When I powered it on again, it was running OpenWrt. Nice.
• openwrt-gemini-generic-verbatim_s08v1901_d1-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin - this works if you installed previous snapshots or factory images from this page. Mostly. Use as any OpenWrt sysupgrade.

Set up OpenWrt after install

OpenWrt is designed for routers, not NAS devices. This means it needs a bit of reconfiguration after installation. The following is just a suggestion, but this probably works for you too!

Plug it into some ethernet port on your LAN that will provide DHCP for devices, and it should happily connect to that network and come up. You need to figure out the IP address but usually you can check what devices have appeared on your network in your main DHCP server/router. It will take some time before the network comes up on the device, a minute or two.

You can ssh root@<IP_NUMBER> or surf to the LuCI interface using http://<IP_NUMBER>

The default user and password in LuCI is simply root and root. (You should change this.)

Disable unused services

Do the following from the command line as root to disable unnecessary services (these are default-enabled in OpenWrt as it is a router distribution first and foremost):

• Disable dnsmasq (useless, we are not a router):

        service dnsmasq disable
        service dnsmasq stop
    

• Disable odhcpd (useless, we are not a router):

        service odhcpd disable
        service odhcpd stop
      

  You might see some processes like udhcpc and odhcp6c still after this: that's OK. It's the client getting IP numbers for your interface.
• Disable firewall (useless if you are behind a firewall such as your home router, and probably just causing problems):

        service firewall disable
        service firewall stop
      

• Edit /etc/config/system to reflect your timezone, or all timestamps will be in UTC. For example I set:

        option timezone 'CET-1CEST,M3.5.0,M10.5.0/3'
    

• Type poweroff to shut down the NAS.

Set up hard drive

I can't tell you what to do here, I can just show you what I usually do:

This sets up a 2GB swap partition on /dev/sda2 and the rest as storage on /dev/sda1:

fdisk /dev/sda
o
n
p
2
ENTER
+2G
t
2
82
n
p
1
ENTER
ENTER
w
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
mkswap /dev/sda2

Initialize the block devices in OpenWrt:

block detect | uci import fstab
uci set fstab.@mount[0].enabled='1'
uci set fstab.@swap[0].enabled='1'
uci commit fstab

I think you can do all of this in LuCI as well. Then you can set up a ksmbd share in LuCI.

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