exFAT Support on ReadyNAS 102

Since the readynas is based on debian, you can add support for exfat via apt-get.
I believe exfat-fuse and exfat-utils should do the trick. Then try to plug your device, wait a minute to see if it auto mounts, otherwise mount it manually.

Don't know how netgear handle the SSH for the warranty though.

They don't give you any warnings when you enable the service in system settings.

Well I do have a warning :
"Please keep in mind that NETGEAR may deny support if you have enabled root SSH access."
And then you have the yes/no choice.

But I guess they won't give any trouble if you don't do anything stupid, but once again, I'm not Netgear support.

Oops - you are correct. I've had it enabled since the original closed (pre-launch beta), and probably forgot about the click through warning.

My understanding is that they aren't supposed to deny support unless there is some evidence that your actions broke the system.

That's what I understood too. The may also saying "or may not".
The fact is, they'll jump on anything to make you do a factory reset (it's the simplest/safest thing for them, if it doesn't work they'll just send you a replacement and the support case will be closed), and that's typically what they hope for.
That said, proving you broke things is quite tricky, you can always erase all the logs (specially bash history). So if they have to prove this, then you're quite safe indeed. They'll have to isolate the problem and to solve it for you to prove you did something wrong.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the readynas (at least ARM versions without video out) have no recovering options appart from the reset which erase everything and the reinstall that I don't know exactly what it does (copying some files from flash, but which ones ? kernel ? grub ?). That's why I don't feel comfortable using SSH on those kind of devices, it's hard to break debian but not impossible and this would mean losing data...

I have it enabled on the RN102, but generally only use it for monitoring what's going on.

On the pro-6 I installed crashplan backup, but other than that basically just keep an eye on the OS partition.

Monitoring can be achieved by SNMP, but I agree it should be presented in the interface. top and memfree could be launched from the interface like they do for the ping on the routers' interface. We already have access to logs.
It can be used to set some things too, like disk spin down ;) cron jobs for defrag and some backup. I know we have some backup ability in the interface, but that's based on shares, my config is based on folders, otherwise I would have to mount too many shares, that's a really big mistake from them. Same thing for user rights, if you want them per folder here goes the SSH (except if you have an AD controller). This means I have to rely on another computer to do the backup for the moment...

IMO, SSH should be needed only for plugins dev, so Netgear needs to improve their OS (already suggested some improvements but I'm waiting for the answer). But I'm pleased they at least give us an easy access to it, for everything they don't think of.

ssh is also handy if you need to deal with a full OS partition.

Yep, but this should never happen ;) with BTRFS on resizing ability, a simple script can do all the checking at boot time (and/or after calling dpkg) and resize automagically if necessary ;)
I believe no one should have to worry about technical things unless he wants to. That's the purpose of having a dedicated device (Advanced networking devices like cisco routers, layer7 firewall are excluded because they are meant to be adaptive and effective more than easy to use since their purpose is highly technical itself).
IMO exfat, ZFS, XFS, JFS, reiserFS drivers should have been integrated along with ext4, btrfs, fat32, NTFS, HFS drivers. Exfat being the only universal filesystem supporting 4Gb+ files (NTFS being not supported by OS X/Linux/BSD and HFS/EXT4 not integrated to windows), I don't understand how it could have been forgotten.

I believe in an highly tweaked and automated system for home devices with the ability to drop into an advanced interface for power users (eventually installed using individual apps like they did for the antivirus, but a setting in account preferences would be great) and the CLI for developers. Three audience, Three interfaces fulfilling every need. Netgear chose to keep an old generation interface (compared to the desktop like interface of Synology), they chose to keep things effective with no drill down clics. That's an effective and simple home user interface. Now they also sell their OS to pro, they need power user features (automation, partitioning, batch renaming, energy savings, performance tweaks, security (no firewall on a device made to be in DMZ/internet !!!), everything to make a small business server (DHCP/DNS/OpenLDAP/monitoring/mail...) and most of all they need folder management !).

Thanks everyone for the replies, I will enable SSH and take that course of action. It seems it is not enabled by default - probably due to licensing.

I use MAC OS and W8 so I need to run with exFAT external drives.

Cheers