NAS devices, SSH access, and secure backups

[markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org]

The "Securely backing up Linux machines to NAS?" discussion got me
thinking...

I have a DLINK-321 NAS device (From Microcenter, of course). The cool
thing about this unit is the fact that the standard firmware is Linux and
it looks for a script file called "fun_plug" on the mounted volume at
startup. This is so vendors can customize the units operation. Well....
There is a fairly good set of Linux utilities that can be installed on
your disk that provide things like sshd, rsync, samba, etc.

I have been running this for a couple months and it seems pretty stable.
The best part is that is does not change the firmware, it merely gets
executed at startup, so it is fairly safe. I bet that most of the units
out there are fairly similar.

So, as per the previous discussion....

If you install the "fun_plug" utilities, you can rsync, through ssh, (or
just scp) your backup into a directory on the NAS without ever making the
backed-up directory exposed through samba.