Updating OS to something modern

> good to see you're still around

I never left. But for the last couple of years my account was blocked because of some weid IP restriction. Today I thought I could check again and lo and behold — I was able to login again for the first time in 5 or 6 years 😂

>   It's not yet "for dummies" with no GUI, but it looks like a great start.

I´m totally aware of that. Quite frankly, it was born from a "scratch your own itch" approach. I don't really need the UI but I wanted to keep the data while at the same being able to use newer tools and apps. Also:

> Personally, I'd prefer a Debian (or at least Ubuntu) based system for greater familiarity

Semantics aside (Ubuntu is based on Debian, therefor it should read "Ubuntu or at least Debian" 😉) I would agree and that was the first line of approach I used. However, the really braindead partitioner used in both, Debian and Ubuntu, prevented me from doing an in-place upgrade. With Alpine however it was really easy to keep the original partitioning and even have the ReadyNAS boot as it alwaxs does: from the internal USB memory.

Since the original Software refused to run on a system I force-upgraded to Debian 10 and since I don't think that NTGR will release the software to OpenSource I decided to ditch it completely and maybe write a new web interface if I felt the need and got the time. Using Golang one could bulld really nice integrated management apps that won't require a web server (just. look at Gitea or EVCC for examples). 

This would then allow for easier integration of other apps using a more modern web server than Apache (think Nginx or Caddy) that isn't also tasked with delivering the management app. So you'd have separation of concerns which makes it easier to secure apps you maybe want to open to the internet.

I also looked at OpenMediaVault but found that it takes a totally different view on shares than th ReadyNAS. So I stopped there since the effort for translating between the ReadyNAS and the OMV approach would have been too much of a hassle. 

Lastly, Alpine has a very easy way of bundling apps. So if anyone would be interested in really building apps on top of the converted system they could do so more easily than when using the Debian eco system.

> mostly because I'd recommend a larger OS partition

That's why I decided to leave the original OS partiton as is and put the Alpine OS on the data partiton. If the conversion fails you should be able to restore the original ReadyNAS OS using the USB recovery method. I know that this also means losing 4GB of possible storage space, but then: who cares? 😉

-Stefan