First, a direct question:I'm currently running my Pro BE's with 5 or 6 disks using "x-raid2" and "dual redundancy." (RAID6 with the xraid2 expansion scheme.)I downloaded the manual for one of the new Os6 devices, and it has led me to believe that the new OS no longer supports dual redundancy while using the proprietary "xraid2" expansion scheme. (Page 34 of the software manual states: "If you want to protect your data against the failure of two disks, you must switch to Flex-RAID and select RAID 6. ")Is this true and accurate?Second, a more general question:There doesn't seem to be a post or document that simply describes what has changed between the version 4 software and the new OS6 software. I've seen a couple of threads where people have tried to ask this, but they seem to go unanswered (besides people mentioning that ext3/4 limits are removed with btrfs, and that btrfs supports all kinds of wonderful things that isn't actually supported in the netgear product such as self-healing.) So, skipping all the marketing hype or netgear add-on stuff such as clouds, genies, and purple smoke in lamps, what does OS6 offer a person or business over the RAIDiator 4 firmware? Please don't include anything that doesn't already exist. (Promises for things that might happen in the future are great, but if they don't ALREADY exist, I have to assume the promises are as empty as the raidiator 4 promise of putting back snapshot resizing.)ThanksGary

Why don't you see by yourself ? Netgear has a VM for that ;) http://apps.readynas.com/pages/?page_id=143This VM fully works for virtualbox. My ESX server boots it with LSI SAS driver but the interface for drives volume is showing only one disk, so you can't test the raid modes. You can update the VM to the latest software if you want, it should work. I don't have a NAS with a 4.x version to give you more detailed informations, but I think/hope the VM will give you every answer you need.

garyd9 wrote:"If you want to protect your data against the failure of two disks, you must switch to Flex-RAID and select RAID 6."Is this true and accurate?Yes. Though switching to flex-raid doesn't require a factory reset (unlike OS4). garyd9 wrote:Second, a more general question:There doesn't seem to be a post or document that simply describes what has changed between the version 4 software and the new OS6 software. I've seen a couple of threads where people have tried to ask this, but they seem to go unanswered (besides people mentioning that ext3/4 limits are removed with btrfs, and that btrfs supports all kinds of wonderful things that isn't actually supported in the netgear product such as self-healing.) So, skipping all the marketing hype or netgear add-on stuff such as clouds, genies, and purple smoke in lamps, what does OS6 offer a person or business over the RAIDiator 4 firmware? Please don't include anything that doesn't already exist. (Promises for things that might happen in the future are great, but if they don't ALREADY exist, I have to assume the promises are as empty as the raidiator 4 promise of putting back snapshot resizing.)xeltros made an excellent suggestion - it is worthwhile to test drive the GUI.I use OS4 on my pro-6 (and an NV+ v1 and duo v1), and OS6 on an RN102 which I use for backup. The OS6 GUI is more modern than the OS4 GUI - though frankly that doesn't matter that much to me.Operationally, OS6 has AntiVirus protection, and snapshots that actually do something useful for me. The kernel is much newer, which has advantages if you want to load your own packages, and is possibly good for security. BTRFS is designed to be more robust than ext4, so it is less likely to get corrupted due to unexpected power loss, etc - but that is not something I am inclined to test. I can understand why you might be skeptical about that (though the robustness isn't really about the self-healing stuff). BTRFS built-in file checksums are nice, even if there is no magic healing. Today I create SFV files in every media folder directory I have (some thousands) so I can verify files. I wouldn't need that if all my file systems had the checksums.OS6 is missing a couple of features I have on the pro-6 - for instance, I can send a WoL packet to a MAC address in an OS4 backup job, but I can't do that with OS6. Disk Spin down isn't there yet (which I suspect you've already seen). I can't schedule scrubs or file system checks yet. The GUI won't let me reset file owner/group and permissions the way I want to reset them. I use all those features, and would miss them if I switched to OS6.Is it worth switching to OS6 on a functional PRO running OS4? In my opinion its not (and I haven't). Though others here obviously do (and have). What might change my mind about switching on my Pro ? Some more features, and not losing Netgear support. Am I happy overall with OS6? Yes. It's been stable, and I think it will work out well as the going forward platform. Having one platform that runs on both ARM and x86 is good for users, not just for Netgear.

Having one platform that runs on both ARM and x86 is good for users, not just for Netgear.I totally agree. It is also better for app developers. What you said about the built in checksum is interesting, did you enable it ? I'd be curious about the performance implication for a 102/104. I know the antivirus is already a killer for performance with the weak ARM CPU, I would expect checksum to be even worst. Snapshots is definitely a wonderful feature. BTRFS has some neat tricks in his pockets and it's not excluded that Netgear put them to use in some 6.3 or 6.4 update. I think the compression system already uses the BTRFS mechanism for example. Since Netgear has some good relationship with BTRFS team, I'm pretty sure we will get "bleeding edge" (when stable and tested, so not that bleeding edge but still...). I have the feeling that Netgear made choices with OS6 for the long run.

Thanks for the reply with answers. Testing a demo on a VM isn't something I wanted to get into right now. Basically, I'm having a dilemma: I have 3 Pro BE boxes. One is out of warranty, and the others are still within the 5 years (but will expire over the next 18 months or so.) Like a complete idiot, I actually believed the firmware release notes for the past 4 to 5 years stating that snapshot resizing would be re-enabled, so I've kept hoping that Netgear wasn't lying to me. Apparently, they were.So, I'm evaluating what I'm going to do now. As they drop out of warranty, the boxes are much less useful to me. One of the primary reasons for spending the extra money on the BE boxes was the 5 year warranty. I always knew that if a p/s died or something, I'd get it repaired or replaced from netgear. As well, I could put the RAID sets into one of the other devices to extract the data. (Yes, I have backups, but its on extremely slow and inconvenient media.) Being that new ReadyNAS devices are using an incompatible OS, I can't even reliably purchase a new replacement box to drop the existing drives into without erasing everything.Combining all this, I need to start planning for cycling these boxes out of use. That means either staying with netgear or moving to a different NAS product completely. Right now, I'm bitter that Netgear has abandoned the devices I still have (and are still under warranty) without re-enabling a feature that I purchased with the devices. In case I haven't made it obvious yet, I think my bitterness is mostly about Netgear promising to re-enable the feature for years, but it's been a lie. That has me leaning away from anything with a "netgear" brand on it.On the other hand, these boxes have served me well over the past several years. I had one warranty "advanced replacement" without too much hassle (once I got past the script jockey when calling for tech support), and I had another die from a lightning strike on the building. (Happily, the 6 drive RAID inside was in perfect condition once I put the drives in another box.) That's a pretty good track record for me. So, I'm trying to look past my bitterness and to evaluate what's different with "OS6" when compared to what I've been using. What will I lose and what will I gain. From what I can tell, I'll gain more flexibility in expanding the RAID and useful snapshots, but I'll lose dual redundancy and scheduled scrubs. (Or, I can retain dual redundancy, but lose some flexibility in expanding the RAID.) For me, the NAS is about FAST and RELIABLE data access across a gigabit network. Drives spinning down doesn't mean anything to me (I have it disabled on the Pro BE boxes.) As well, anything with the word "cloud" in it is actually a negative and would be disabled. Beyond the fluff, are there any other actual differences?Even though I'm trying to get past my bitterness, I have to assume that any feature that doesn't exist TODAY will never exist no matter what promises are made, and that Netgear might even take a feature or two away from me. Netgear has proven that this is one of the "hidden costs" of doing business with them. So, that's why I was hoping that someone could make it simple and describe "what's different." (Please pardon me if the post is a bit long winded and repetitive.)Gary

I do have checksums enabled but haven't seen performance issues. I am running jbod, not raid - which could matter. Though another recent post suggested that the checksums might actually not turn off, no matter how the GUI is set. I started with the SFV files years ago when I lost a main disk and then discovered that the backup (optical) had read errors. Being able to verify the data if I wanted to seemed like a good idea going forward. It'd be hard to do on the photos and documents, since they aren't as regularly organized. But the audio and video libraries are (one folder per album, etc), so I just make them as I rip things.I have antivirus turned off. The PCs have AV protection, so I don't see the need for it. And on the ARM the performance penalty is significant.File system compression is another OS6 feature that OS4 doesn't have. I don't have it on though (it helps for documents, but not media that is already compressed).

"OS6" - a question or three | NETGEAR Communities

65 Replies

Replies have been turned off for this discussion

xeltros
Apprentice
Sep 14, 2014
In this case this is a backup, couldn't we override the rights for newly created objects ? Rights would not be propagated recursively but created as they needed to be created.
garyd9
Virtuoso
Sep 14, 2014
There's another monkey wrench... My environment is on a windows domain (ADS) so slightly different rules apply. I'm trying to find out what happens if I change perms from a windows server. I suppose it kind of depends on just how Samba preserves windows permissions. If they are stored and preserved on the USB device, it's not too bad. If they aren't (or if they are nuked when the device ejects) then that's no fix.

(Doing it from windows is a bit of PITA right now. All of my windows machines at home are unavailable so I'm having to VM from a mac.)
garyd9
Virtuoso
Sep 14, 2014
Okay, I tried that... and it's useless. The "everyone" ADS permission is restored (with "full control") as soon as I eject and reconnect the USB device.

It wouldn't have mattered even if it worked, as AFP keeps coming back with read/write perms for "everyone" as well.

Very disappointing.
garyd9
Virtuoso
Sep 14, 2014
udev calls /frontview/bin/setup_usb_storage (a perl script) whenever a partition is added...

That script scans /etc/default/services and aborts if DISP_HIDE_USB_STORAGE exists in there. (This isn't useful, as the usb partition must be mounted for the backup to work.)

It then does quite a bit of work to basically just mount the usb device. (There's a configuration file that doesn't seem to serve any purpose other than trying to keep the mounted directory (and share) name consistent: storage.conf.) One line from this script I find interesting is:
system("ACTION=add rnutil hotplug_event UsbStorage");

rnutil appears to be a sort of shell type utility, but beyond a list of basic commands, I'm not sure how to use it (or how to alter what it might do.) I suspect that if I were to remove the above system() call from the perl script, that it wouldn't share the USB mounted devices. That might be a nice temp work-around that would probably shred any warranty, but isn't feasible as a sustainable fix. (It'd probably be overwritten on every firmware update, and might have all kinds of unpleasant side effects.)

@Mdgm, any chance you could get more information about this? (I understand if you answer "no" -- I'm probably messing with stuff that netgear would rather I stay away from.)

Edit: Thankfully, "strings" was left in busybox (even if there's no link, I can still run "busybox strings".) It saved me the trouble of looking for a .deb package. I can't know for sure, of course, but it appears that the default shares are created via /usr/lib/librndb.so.0. For usb hotplug devices, the config files are created in /etc/frontview/usb/._share/devicename (replace "devicename" with something like "USB_HDD_1") and have contents that seem to be hard coded in the above mentioned shared lib.

Take care
Gary
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired
Sep 15, 2014
I don't think I can provide more information on this.

Forum Discussion

"OS6" - a question or three

65 Replies

Related Content

Ultra 4 Plus - Upgraded to OS6 (v6.10.2) = "Undefined Error" Messages

Readynas Ultra 4 on OS6 unresponsive displays " sg_next+0"

OS6 on Legacy x86 "could not properly extract" issue

Extender question

RBR750/RBS750 Firmware Question

NETGEAR Academy

ProSupport for Business