OS 6 tips and tricks

I believe this would be a good idea to provide some tips to use with OS6 units. Anyone will take its responsibilities and decide to use them or not.

As a disclaimer I will tell that enabling SSH may cause Netgear to deny support, I don't know what's their exact policy for that. I know they did enable it on my unit for the last ticket I filled and I don't think they will deny me support for something they did. So I think unless you harm the system they will support but I'm no Netgear and can't think for them.
Before trying anything you want to understand it. Don't apply something you don't understand. Tips provided come with no warranty and may be unsafe. Use with caution.



Activating EXFat support

apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

plug the drive and wait for it to show.

Reducing the number of apache process
I personnaly don't use apache unless I need to log to the dashboard. By default Netgear has 5 startup servers, you can get this down to one. This will save you a few Mb of memory (always useful on the RN102/104)
go to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
replace StartServers values with 1. Replace MinSpareServers with 1.

apachectl restart

Solve apache warning about hostname
You may get "apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using YourIPAddress for ServerName" while starting apache. I don't know for you but I hate to get warnings ;)
In /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
add a line beginning with ServerName followed by the domain name.

show detailed memory information (safe)

cat /proc/meminfo

Add autodefrag to BTRFS mount options (experimental feature)
edit /etc/fstab
add ",autodefrag" after nodatasum (no space).

mount -o remount /data. 
mount |grep data

you should see autodefrag in the mount options

show CPU usage and process running (safe)

top

Mount SMB shares
create the folder you want the share to be mounted to.
/mnt/share for example :

mkdir /mnt/share
mount -t cifs -o username=User,password=Password //IP/Mount-point /mnt/share/

Defrag from command line
This is the default defrag command for recursive defrag. Doing it with /data won't work so you'll have to do it with every folder in /data to get a full defrag. (source : https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php ... y_files.3F ).

find /data/Share-Name -xdev -type f -exec btrfs filesystem defragment -v -- {} +

I added the verbose mode (-v) so that you can see the last file processed.
you can exclude files :

find /data/Share-Name ! -path "*filename" -xdev -type f -exec btrfs filesystem defragment -v -- {} +

Running a test VM
http://apps.readynas.com/pages/?page_id=143

Adding color to ls
edit the .bashrc file in your home directory (~/.bashrc)
add a line with :

alias ls='ls --color'

Free memory
it speeds up my NAS web interface, it shouldn't but it does. Effect should be void at reboot.

echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Firewall
with 6.1.7RC5 (untested on other version) you can get basic iptables support. You definitely don't want SSH to be accessible from internet, do you ? This lets you deny everything (AFP, SMB...) at once without going on every config file.
This script allows only incoming HTTPS and ping on interface eth1 (the second one). Rules are erased at boot by default, you can enforce them via cron for example but you definitely want to test before doing that. I kept everything simple but you can be way more paranoid.

#GET ETH1 IP ADDRESS (if you use DHCP and want filtering with rules implying IP address destination/sourcei use $IP_ETH1 instead of ETH1 IP address)
IP_ETH1=`ifconfig eth1 |grep "inet addr" | awk '{ print $2 }' |cut -b6-`

#ERASE OLD RULES
iptables -F

#PASS HTTPS
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT -i eth1
#PING INBOUND RULE SIMPLE
iptables -A INPUT -p icmp --icmp-type 8 -j ACCEPT -i eth1

#BLOCK ANYTHING ELSE (add anything that should be allowed before this rule)
iptables -A INPUT -j DROP -i eth1

send a mail
for your scripts...

cat test.mail | msmtp -a default dest@domaine.com

with test.mail formatted as this (with the empty line):

subject: subject-message

message of the mail.

I'll try to post some more if people are interested.