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Forum Discussion
BTRFS read-only state, OS 6.8.10, ReadyNAS Ultra 4
Hello, everybody! It seems like I have met the same problem as a few other people here, namely BTRFS becoming read-only. Background Machine is Ultra 4, with 2GB memory, converted to run OS6. Capac...
Thank you, StephenB !
I hope you have had a nice trip... My reply is delayed for several reasons, one of them being reading logs and tryig to understand stuff on my own. I have 3 NASes that have misbehaved from time to time, sometimes displaying filp_close+9 in the LCD just before hanging, sometimes it was some other text. Long time ago I put those NASes on "nightly reboot", in hope that the problems would diminish if the NAS did a fresh restart every night at 3 AM (via Power Management in the GUI). I also searched logs for error messages displayed, an actually I located one of the error messages in the logs, and also saw that I possibly had a disk problem not reflected in the error count on the disk. One of the logs reported repeated problems re-allocating a number of blocks. Finding disks on Ebay in reasonable condition and resonable price, as well as reinstallig fw (reverting to 6.10.8, as I want my sheell-in-a-box installed), restoring backups and resyncing took some time. But then it was fixed.
So I thought.
Boy, I was wrong! This very evening I could not connect to one of the NASes and decided to do a port scan. It showed that two of the machines were having issues: ports 80, 22 and 443, as well as 21 were gone, although there was still somebody listening on ports 25, 110, 119, 143, 465 and others. I then went to the machines and pressed briefly the backup button to see what they say. The one called NAS5 displayed incoherent characters on the display, i.e. gibberish. The one called NAS6 displayed understandable text about backup button being depressed. Oh, well - time to use PWR button twice to take them down in orderly manner. The NAS6 went down in a few minutes, NAS5 just did nothing, so I had to use a long pressure on PWR to cut power the brutal way. After reboot NAS6 went up without problems, but NAS5 started resyncing.
After the reboot I took a dive into the logs. Nothing unusual in NAS5, although it was not accessible and displayed gibberish on the LCD. In the logs of NAS6 (kernel.log and system.log) I could see that it reported error codes from curl all the time after 7PM. The msmtp.log reported about the NAS6 not being able to locate smtp-mail.outlook.com. So somehow I wonder. Do I have faulty hardware? Do I have other problems that I have no clue about? StephenB will you be able and kind to look at my logs? I will send you a PM with a link.
You may have a hardware issue, but it's a bit early to say you do. The Ethernet and power on/off circuit in your NAS are powered by a separate voltage from the PSU labeled "+5VSB", for +5 Volts Standby. That voltage stays on even when the NAS is "off". And because of that, it's often the first to go, and if the NAS is in a hot environment, that can be worse because the fan is off when the NAS is "off". This also most often happens on units that are powered on and off routinely, which sounds like what your NAS sees. Some of your issues do sound like they could be related to that. The "error message" you see at power-down may not be that -- it may be something you are never supposed to see because the unit shuts down. But it could also be a software error and the last thing executed before a crash prevented reaching power-off.
Are you also sometimes seeing issues where it won't power up, by schedule, power button, or WoL? If so, that points to a PSU issue even more.
Hello, thanks for your input. I'll try to answer as well as I can.
The thought it could be a hardware issue occurred to me as well - why would otherwise one of the machines sometimes disappear from the network or hang, and the other one just hang. Are PSU or hardware issues a common problem with those machines? They are not standing in a specially warm environment, it's regular room temperature. The fans are in "quiet" mode, just because the machines are close to my desk. The problems are not related to time of year (i.e. ambient temperature) from what I can remember.
Maybe I had bad luck when buying my Ultra 4 / Pro 4 on Ebay, but I actually cannot recall having those problems when they were running the old (Radiator?) 4.x firmware. Only when I changed to OS6 I got those issues. On the other hand, I used the very same image file to install OS6 on a Ultra 6 and a Pro 6 and they were rock solid. So the OS6 image should be correct.
As far as power off/on goes: I started with the off/on routine because of the problems I experienced with my non-responsive NASes. I thought the random non-responsiveness was caused by some software problem (e.g. memory leak or similar) - and such are often fixed by a reboot, at least in the Windows world. Hence the power off/on routine, that was initiated because of problems, not the other way round. And yes, when you say about something crashing that prevents the NAS from reaching power down, I have seen that manifested in a very special way:
- NAS starting to shut down before scheduled power off
- NAS trying to send email about shutdown
- Ethernet not there, so loggin an error
- In the morning I see a NAS dead but with power on
- Hard power off via button and subsequent power on
- Only then I get the email about NAS shutting down.
As far as POWER UP is concerned, no issues whatsoever. Not a single time. When it powers off on schedule then it always powers up on schedule. The same with manual power off / on. Never tried WoL, as I do not have that need.Any other ideas that I should dig into?
The power supplies used in 4-bay legacy ReadyNAS have a modified connector pin-out, but are otherwise just standard supplies for a small-profile desktop computer. As such, they have a limited life -- and few keep a computer as long as they do a NAS. So I would not say they have "problems", but they are a common first casualty due to age.
Have you added RAM to the unit? While most don't have an issue with just the base 1GB until OS 6.10.x, it can be an issue, especially if you run apps.
Replacement supplies are available on eBay, or you could make an adapter cable and use an external ATX supply long enough to see if the supply is the issue. Given the age of both the hardware and firmware, you do need to consider whether it's worthwhile investing any more into a legacy ReadyNAS.
Thanks for the tip about the PSU. I will see if I can try out a 300W (or 350?) PSU that I have lying somewhere, brand new. Where do I find the information on modified pinout? Could it be the same in Ultra4 / Pro4 as in Ultra6?
As far as memory goes, yes - all my 4 bay Intel ReadyNASes got 2GB when converted into OS6. Could 4GB of memory offer better stability? The thing is, they are almost never subject to much load. The only apps I have been able to install on the units converted to OS6 were shell-in-a-box and SMB+. For some reason, that I have not been able to figure out, apps like MySQL and its PHP-based tools were not possible to install (some missing package in some inaccessible repository, if I recall). So no, no heavy apps.
As of now, I have no direct plans to go for any replacement of the Readynas things. I actually like the OS6 and the capabilities (not the instability, though).
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