Readynas as VM and build-essential

So I made a debian Jessie VM and built Python3.6 on it...and copied the binary over to my readynas and guess what...it worked!  Except Medusa actually needs at least 3.7 now I think.  I'm gonna try to build 3.10 and see how it goes.  I was not able to build 3.12 on the Jessie VM, build fails halfway through.  Maybe I could solve that or I'll just try 3.10, etc. to see if I can get Medusa working.

But anyway if I can get python3.7+ working then I may be able to get medusa going again on my readynas.  Kind of a PITA to do it this way but hey..if it works I won't complain.  This will get a few more years of use out of my 524X as complete TV show box.

I sure wish Netgear would have archived their apt repo before shutting down NAS dept.  Having build-essential would have been helpful.  I will presume that most other important tools or libraries that needed netgear specific binaries were already in 6.10.9 and I don't actually need access to the netgear repo for much other then build-essential, which they chose not to include in the firmware but do require netgear specific binaries.

Or if they would give us just build-essential (plus dependencies) in stand alone dpkg files..that would be ok too... but I think the train has left the station on that front..  if anyone knows anyone at Netgear that might be able to make that happen though..please pass the word.

oh well.  

The good news is that the basic front view functionality continues to work quite well as intended.  I'd just get a new modern NAS, but I'm finding that the non-arm ones that support ECC are rather expensive.  next time I want one that also will be able to boot alternative OS in order to future proof it or maybe I'll just use OpenMediaVault or TrueNas or proxmox from the get go anyway, but I want to know that in the future I could boot them up with just about any OS I want and use them in some way, unlike my 524X which has been reduced to its most simple duties.  However my 524X has ECC memory, which I still consider important and am saddened to see that only more expensive NAS units even support ECC memory at all.  But a lot of them do run any OS and basically docker containers and VM's are common place...so you can host any services you want on them and they have plenty of resources to handle it.  most of them have HDMI and you could basically use as a desktop PC if you really wanted to.

Either that or maybe I'll just get a little minipc, put proxmox on it with all my services and keep using the 524X as a basic file server.  That's actually cheaper than getting a new NAS entirely (with ECC).  Some services won't be quite as fast over NFS/SMB but maybe fine.  Relook at NAS's again in a few years.  If I got a 10gbit switch and a minpc with 10gbit...might not be terrible SMB performance.

to be honest I am leaning away from using RAID1+ at all anymore, as long as I have proper 321 backups happening.  I don't need the redundancy.  I am happy to restore from a local or cloud backup if something dies.  But this starts to question whether I even need a real multi-bay NAS device anymore.  It used to be that the only way to have really large volumes was by using raid5, but these days we can get huge HDD's much larger then I will probably ever need.  So that purpose is not a factor anymore.  Redundancy would be interesting if I were running business with it, but I'm not.  Raid only adds complication and failure points for the un-needed benefit of redundancy, and requires more proactive and costly maintenance to keep the raid healthy and deal with restoring a raid where a drive has gone bad, etc.  It is all great tech for redundancy, don't get me wrong, but if I don't actually need redundancy, its overhead and additional failure points and no gain in functionality that I actually need.    So anyway the point is, maybe I won't even transition to a modern NAS at all, I'm kicking the can down the road.  If I can run my TV stuff on the 524X for a few more years...then great!  I do like having my file data storage on BTRFS or ZFS even without raid in order to have checksum scrubs and snapshots.  Also the nas OS such as readynas are doing proper smartctl tests and scheduled maintenance, snapshot scheduling, etc.  That's all a good reason to use some kind of NAS oriented OS...even if not raided.