When something is not working: where to start

7 min · 9 sections

This guide is ordered by what you see, not by what is broken. Find the symptom and it tells you what to check, and in what order.

One rule first: the panel says what it knows and does not guess. If a screen gives you a reason, that reason has been checked; if it says "could not look", it really could not, and that is where this guide comes in.

1. I cannot open the panel

First separate two very different things: the NAS is not answering or your browser will not go in. Ten seconds tells them apart.

What you see	What it is, and where to go
"This site can't be reached", it hangs and fails	The NAS is not answering, or is not at that address → 1.1 and 1.2
A certificate warning or "Your connection is not private"	The NAS answers fine: it is its own certificate → Installing the panel as an app
The panel opens blank, or with an address bar that was not there before	A saved shortcut, not the installed app → Installing the panel as an app
"The NAS is not responding right now (restarting?)"	The panel started but cannot reach its server → 1.3

1.1 Is it still at that address?

The number one cause of "it does not open" is not a fault: the IP changed. It happens when the router restarts and hands out addresses again.

With a monitor and keyboard on the NAS, or over SSH:

lgm

It shows the version, the machine name and the panel's address. If it is different from the one you had saved, that was the problem, and the real fix is to give it a fixed address: Control Panel → Network, or lgm set-ip from the console.

1.2 Is the service running?

systemctl status nas-backend nas-helper

Those are the two that matter: nas-backend is the panel and nas-helper is the privileged process that does the system work. If either is stopped:

sudo systemctl restart nas-backend
lgm log

lgm log shows the panel's log, which is where the reason will be.

⚠️ If you have just updated and the panel does not come back, see section 6.

1.3 "The NAS is not responding right now (restarting?)"

This message appears inside the panel: the page loaded, so the browser reached the NAS at some point. Two cases:

You just updated or restarted. Normal for a few seconds; the panel retries on its own.
It shows immediately and never goes away. Then the page you are looking at came from the browser's saved copy, not from the NAS. It is usually the certificate: the browser refuses the connection and never gets to show you its own warning, which is the only screen where you can accept it. The message itself has an "Enter without the saved copy" button that clears that copy and reloads; then the usual certificate warning appears.

2. I get in, but an app says I have no access

That is not a fault: it is how apps are shared out. Every account has its own apps and at which level — look, or look and touch — and the NAS decides, not the icon.

Whoever administers changes it in Control Panel → Users and groups → the account → Apps. It is covered in full in Users, permissions and who sees what.

Two things that confuse people:

The icon is gone. Removing an app also removes it from that account's desktop and search. It has not been uninstalled: it is not theirs.
I can see it but not change it. That is the "view" level. The buttons that write are not shown.

3. I cannot see the NAS from Windows, Mac or my phone

In order, from most common to least:

Does that account have access to the folder? Sharing a folder and giving someone access are two different things: Control Panel → Shared folders → the folder → Permissions.
Is the protocol on? SMB, NFS and WebDAV are switched on separately in `Control Panel → File services`, and each must also be ticked on each folder.
The SMB password is not the panel one if you never set it. They are set together when the account is created, but changing one does not change the other.
Type the address by hand instead of waiting for it to appear: on Windows \\192.168.1.50, on Mac smb://192.168.1.50. Automatic network discovery is the first thing that breaks and it means nothing.

All the detail, device by device, in Connecting your devices.

4. It is slow

Before touching anything, look at who is working: Monitor shows CPU, memory, network and disks live. With that, three cases:

Disks at 100 % and everything else quiet. Almost always a scrub, a backup or the photo indexer. It passes; Storage and Backups show what is running.
Network maxed out. Someone is copying something, or a torrent is seeding. The download speed limits are in the Downloads app.
Everything quiet and still slow. If it is a torrent, check the port warning in Downloads: with the port closed you only download from peers you reach out to, which is a fraction of the speed. If it is SMB, try copying one big file instead of many small ones: a thousand 10 KB files are a thousand conversations, and that is slow on any NAS.

5. A disk is reporting errors

Do not unplug it yet. With RAID, pulling the wrong disk turns a problem into a loss.

Storage → Health says which disk it is and what is wrong (SMART). Write down its **serial number**, which is the only thing that does not move; the letter (sda, sdb) can change on reboot.
If the volume still works, make a backup now before touching anything. A disk that starts failing usually holds on for hours.
Replacement is done from the panel and is covered step by step in [Disaster recovery](disaster-recovery.md).

6. I updated and something is wrong

lgm log and lgm progress tell you what happened in the last update.

The panel does not come back. The updater keeps a copy of the units before touching them precisely for this. systemctl status nas-backend will say whether it fails to start, and lgm log why.
It fails while building the interface. On a machine with little memory, the step that builds the panel runs out of RAM. The installer and the updater already add temporary swap for that; if it still fails, the message says which command failed and with what.
A critical task half done. If a restore or a backup is running, the update refuses to start. That is on purpose.

7. The disk filled up

First work out which disk: the system one and the data one are different and are fixed differently.

The data volume. Control Panel → Space report shows where the disk is going and the duplicates. Watch out for snapshots: what you delete keeps taking up room while a snapshot still remembers it.
The system disk. It fills up with logs, Docker images and downloads pointed at the wrong place. The Clean button in the Package Centre — which removes images and volumes nobody uses any more — and the recycle bin are the first two places to look.

8. How to ask for help with data

If you are going to ask, this is what makes it answerable:

lgm info      # version, machine and address
lgm log       # the panel's log
systemctl status nas-backend nas-helper

And from the panel, the Connectivity section of the Control Panel has the network checks — resolve a name, reach the internet, see whether a port answers — without leaving the browser.

⚠️ Before pasting a log anywhere, read it. The panel strips passwords from the messages it shows, but a system log is the system's and may carry internal addresses or your folder names.