Very frustrating tech support (15682575)

Things are better!! As of last Friday, it appears the system is back up and running properly. Also on Friday, a new tech support person (Josh Jones) started with working with me. He has been very helpful. Here's my last email exchange with him from this morning.
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Josh:

Thank you so much for this report. I really appreciate it. You have been tremendous to work with.

I ran the disk test as we discussed yesterday, and I presume it ran OK... the system apparently rebooted itself as you said it would around 10:42 last night, and is back up and running. There is nothing in the FrontView status log about the disk test... there is just a single entry saying "System is up". So "no news is good news"? Everything is OK on the drives?

Thanks again Josh. Like I said, you have been fantastic - by far the best person I have spoken to and worked with at NetGear. You have been very helpful, you've followed up when you said you would, and your thorough research and explanation of this issue has greatly eased my mind about the reliability of my ReadyNAS. Could I please get contact information for your supervisor? I want to encourage them to not only recognize you, but to work to get your colleagues up to your level. All of the other tech support personnel I dealt with on this issue were very disappointing compared to you:
1. Most seemed to be off my time-zone (Phillipines?), so every little step took at least a day.
2. English is not their first language. There were communication problems.
3. I had no visibility to my case notes. This is a BIG issue... much of my frustration was due to a lack of proactive communication from NetGear. If I could have accessed the case notes on-line and seen progress, it would not have been so frustrating. As it was, it seemed like days would go by with no apparent progress.
4. You are by far the most knowledgeable person I spoke with. Your explanations and requests were clear, as demonstrated in your email below.
5. You were sympathetic and apologized to me. You empathized with me. Nobody else did.
6. You were prompt. You got back to me quickly with this full report.

Once again, great job. It has been a pleasure working with you.

James



On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Josh Jones <jjones@netgear.com> wrote:

Hi James,



In taking a look through the configuration on the NAS, everything does seem to be in-place. Even the more-tricky hard-linking of 64-bit FS tools seems to have been done correctly – which is a good sign.



Regarding the events that led-up to the issue, it looks like here’s what happened (leaving out some details that do not appear to have directly affected the issue, such as reboots etc):

1. Communication to/from disk 1 was lost. Disk 1 was kicked from the active RAID arrays (there are three arrays, the OS, swap and data array).

2. The chassis was replaced, disks 2-4 were put into the replacement unit and the unit was booted.

3. After the boot was successful, disk 1 was re-added and synced successfully, however, it appears that critical RAID superblock data was not written correctly to the OS and swap arrays on the disk. This may have been the “homehost” information which would link the RAID superblocks to the MAC address of the NAS.

4. About 12 hours later, communication to/from disk 4 was lost. It was kicked from the active RAID arrays.

5. A subsequent reboot caused the unit to boot with the impression that disk 1’s OS and swap arrays were not synced, and disk 4 was out of sync in general. This caused the both drives to appear as dead.

6. Throughout subsequent reboots, drive 4’s data array resync’d and updated correctly, but both drive 1 and 4’s OS and swap array information would not persist across reboots, causing them to appear as dead each time.

7. Support manually recreated theses arrays, erasing configuration. This ensured that the drives would be assembled into the array at boot.

8. During the subsequent manual rebuild of the OS, a necessary file (/etc/hostname) was not created/configured.

9. Upon creating that file, everything appears to be functioning.



If this is accurate, for the most part, then the following actions will need to be taken (I am working on doing these now):

1. The original issue of disk 1 showing as dead may have been caused by the auto-spindown setting. I’d recommend running a ‘Disk Test’ from the boot menu on the NAS as a precaution, but in the meantime I will try to get a hold of this drive model and experiment with the auto-spindown feature. While this is part of our standard qualification procedure, it’s possible that the combination of events that led-up to the failure were not experienced during testing.

2. I will try to reproduce the issue where the OS/swap arrays are not updated correctly, causing disks to appear as dead upon reboot.

3. I will notify support on the best practice for rebuilding the OS so as to preserve the configuration whenever possible.



As per our phone conversation, I’ll also put-in a feature request to create a Time Machine backup job option. Also, here is a link that discusses how to set-up ReadyNAS Remote so that the ReadyNAS can easily be accessed through a secure VPN tunnel by clients that are not on the same LAN:

http://www.readynas.com/?cat=52



Please let me know if there are any questions/concerns.



Thanks!

- Josh