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Forum Discussion
Dewdman42
Jul 16, 2025Virtuoso
Factory Reset and some questions
Continuation from other thread about my bad disk(s)... Now that I have factory reset it, it's a bit depressing to realize I lost all kinds of customizations I had made to ReadyNASOS over the cour...
StephenB
Jul 18, 2025Guru - Experienced User
Dewdman42 wrote:I create a share called "raid", which will be my primary data share to hold everything, aside from the Home share that readynas OS creates automatically. This shows up in ssh as /data/raid. Fine so far.
at some point I created a dir called /data/raid/extra and put stuff in it
however this dir shows up in two places, it shows up in /data/raid/extra, and it shows up in /home/sjs/extra, and they appear to both be linked in some way to the same thing, they both have the same dir hierarchy under them, but the one under /home/sjs doesn't have any of the files that are on the real extra dir I created and populate with files over on that /data/raid share.
There are some multiple paths, but /data/raid/extra and /home/sjs/extra aren't among them. So I have no idea how that happened.
If you access the NAS with admin credentials using file explorer (\\nas-ip-address) you would see this in the root
- data
- home
- raid
- admin
If you move down into data, you should see
- raid
- home
These are the same as the raid and home folders you see in the root. That is to say that \\nas-ip-address\data\raid is the same folder as \\nas-ip-address\raid, and \\nas-ip-address\data\home is the same folder as \\nas-ip-address\home
If you instead move down into home, you should see
- sjs
- admin
So
- \\nas-ip-address\home\sjs
- \\nas-ip-address\data\home\sjs, and
- \\nas-ip-address\sjs
are the same folder.
Similarly,
- \\nas-ip-address\home\admin ,
- \\nas-ip-address\data\home\admin, and
- \\nas-ip-address\admin
are the same folder.
Note that if instead you use file explorer with sjs credentials (\\nas-ip-address), you see this in the root
- raid
- sjs
If you are looking with ssh (as I think you are doing), you will see something a bit different. /apps, /data and /home are all in //.
/data/home and /home are the same folder. So are /apps and /data/.apps
More specifically they are all mount points into the data volume. If you run findmnt you can see that.
├─/data /dev/md127 btrfs rw,noatime,nodiratime,nospace_cache,subv
├─/home /dev/md127[/home] btrfs rw,noatime,nodiratime,nospace_cache,subv
├─/apps /dev/md127[/.apps] btrfs rw,noatime,nodiratime,nospace_cache,subv
Dewdman42 wrote:any info about how I should setup apt repo today in 2025?
Instructions are here:
This is a rather long thread, so maybe start with this particular post:
FWIW, this is not because of anything Netgear did. Debian Jessie was deprecated by the Debian community, and they moved their libraries to a new archived location. The changes above adjust apt so it uses the archived libraries.
These changes are only needed if you install something that requires adding a debian library that is not already installed on the NAS. If the add-ons you want are already working, then you could skip them.
Dewdman42 wrote:any old deb from Mhynlo is long gone
While Netgear has taken down their apps page, the download links in this archived page still work:
A direct link to Mhynlo's nzbget x86 deb file is here:
Dewdman42
Jul 19, 2025Virtuoso
A direct link to Mhynlo's nzbget x86 deb file is here:
Yes thanks. I had already found that a few days ago and did try it. It doesn't work for me, from front view I just get an error box that says it can't be ran or can't be installed or something along those lines, no other info. I would be curious if you try to install it what happens.
It doesn't leave behind anything in /apps either. However I can manually decompress the deb file and get the contents of the data dir to populate /apps/nxzbget-rn/, ok but whatever setup work that is normally done by the installation system is unknown to me and not handled. The postinst script inside there doesn't do much, it calls rn_nml whatever that is, which I already tried to do manually also, but didn't make any difference, I think there is more stuff under the covers that the front view app installer does automatically, such as installing the systemd service entry and whatever it needs to do to make the logo.png visible in front view, etc.. but anyway it fails...for some reason. Since my apt-get is not configured probably as of right now, maybe that's why? before I did this factory reset, I had a lot of non-standard stuff installed over the years and everything always just worked any dependencies on weird stuff like python or whatever was no problem, but now after the factory reset, its anybody's guess.
for now I just installed nzbget myself manually using a linux installation script from their team, and then I manually installed the systemd service, so its starting up on boot up..... frontview doesn't know about it, just means I have to start and stop it with ssh. but I never stop it, so its fine. Would be nice if I could figure out how to either get MHynlo's installer to work, or else manually do whatever it was doing, in order to get it to show up in front view, but I couldn't figure it out from looking at the control folder of the deb...I think there is a higher level program of some kind when you upload a deb through front view, its doing other tasks automatically, and I don't know how to log that, trace it debug it or do it manually...so I give up on that...and that's fine. Keep it simple.
FWIW, this is not because of anything Netgear did. Debian Jessie was deprecated by the Debian community, and they moved their libraries to a new archived location. The changes above adjust apt so it uses the archived libraries.
These changes are only needed if you install something that requires adding a debian library that is not already
I'll check out those threads, but if it's what I am thinking it was somebody who found a way to mirror the entire repo, which I am not prepared to do. I understand about the jessie stuff moving and back ports too, I have tried a couple archives and got a few things installed, but I don't want to go much deeper at this point, I'll just leave this thing fairly factory, and use these disks until they die with losable plex content. In the future I MIGHT use it as a backup server only. I feel Netgear has more than stopped supporting it, they have proactively deprecated it. It is what it is. As long as you stick to factory capabilities though I think it can run fine as a simple file server for many years, but at some point we'll all want faster ethernet...so.... I have an older Readynas Ultra here also that I will try to use for backup server, it might not even have OS6 I can't remember, but it should keep working for basic file service.
The reason I mentioned the Netgear repos is because when I tried to install build-essential or build-essentials, whatever its called, as I recall that had to be Netgear's version of it in order to deal with special libraries and stuff that Netgear made for this device. but when I tried to install it I got only errors, and at some point I got an error about unable to install it (from a jessie repo maybe) because of dependency on something from Netgear repo. Well this was a few weeks ago, I can't remember exactly and I tried different repos and now reverted apt sources back to whatever was in my factory reset (which appears to not even know how to find anything called build-essential or build-essentials. With that I guess I could compile things like python and python 3.6+, etc...
but..like I said...I think I am reversing back to just using this in factory state, though I would like to have apt sources configured for the most up to date and complete repo from Netgear as well as the most up to date jessie and back ports...that doesn't give weird errors and warnings, just in case I ever need to install some little tool., but as of now I already updated vim, added wget, htop, ncdu. There actually isn't that much I really need that doesn't get massively more complicated to install, such as compiling tools, python, etc. And clearly...this box is deprecated now. I think its better to just use it in simple file server tasks...I will use plex server as long as it keeps running. I have upgraded RAM and Intel it handles all my content perfectly fine. Nzbget seems tow work easily too, its a self contained binary that seems to work fine with factory Netgear libs that are installed.
In the past I have had all manner of cool things running, crash plan, docker, all different kinds of servers, python, python3 greater than 3.5, and on and on. But this time around it just feels all blockaded off, and of course whatever resources I used to have a bunch of stuff from readynasextras, etc... this all helped move me long and up and so forth...but now its just all gone and blocked and basically I think it makes more sense to keep it simple.
However, I would like to to at least have it configured for the most up to date apt-get repo from Netgear and the best archive for jessie and jessie back ports...I was getting some weird errors where it was needing a key or something...strange...
So
- \\nas-ip-address\home\sjs
- \\nas-ip-address\data\home\sjs, and
- \\nas-ip-address\sjs
Thank you for taking so much time to write that out, I already understood most of what you wrote about how the shares are structured and that they are linked to something at the root level and also under /data...but that isn't the problem I was having. I created a folder called "extra" inside my /data/raid share. Somehow that folder was appearing also inside /data/home/sjs share.
It's remotely possible I tried to do a mv across shares and now I vaguely recall the Netgear version of. mv or cp or both, so some unique things when copying or moving across shares, which my understanding has something to do with them being BTRFS sub volumes or something like that. I didn't do anything other than mkdir, mv or cp..but somehow that subfolder inside one share, ended up hard linked in some way to a subfolder by the same name over under the other share...except one share didn't show any files..it only showed the folder and all subfolders under it too...but none of the files. Strange. I fixed it by temporarily moving all the files underneath to some other folder on /data/raid, then did rm of the one over on /data/home/sjs...and now its gone, so all fine. Wish I could remember how it got there to begin with, but now I vaguely recall there is something weird about using mv across BTRFS shares. But might be something else too, dunno.
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