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Prodigy

May 12, 2017

Solved

Best Practices Preparing for Firmware Upgrade

A bit slow on the uptake for upgrade this time, mostly because I've been busy traveling and wound up learning about 6.7.1 in the DVBLogic user forums when people began complaining their USB tuners stopped working (usu due to kernel upgrade).

Anywho, I've been reading through these forums now to see whether folks have experienced issues with this upgrade. I know the last one or two have resulted in temporarily losing access to my data volume. Not good, but addressed fairly quickly with support tickets. I would like to try and avoid the need for support calls whenever there's an upgrade though.

So this leads to my question. Are there steps that would be recommended to follow in order to reduce the likelihood of experiencing a NAS that won't cleanly boot during/after upgrade or being welcomed with a data volume that won't mount as it should post-upgrade?

Right now, this is the best I can contemplate:

Disable all apps.
Reboot once or twice to be sure reboots are OK before upgrading.
Download logs
Download configuration
Review logs (esp for disks and volumes) to check for signs of trouble; if any exist, resolve those first.
Go for upgrade
Reboot once or twice after upgrade to be sure things are healthy.
Consider upgrading apps (e.g. DVBLink) that have dependencies on things like kernel drivers
Reboot one or twice after to be sure things are healthy
Re-enable all apps.

Basically, gather up all diagnostic and configuration data (that might be needed for a support request), check on the health of the thing before doing anything crazy like upgrading, and disable all third party stuff to avoid untested interactions... and then restore those after a successful upgrade.

Installation & Upgrade

mdgm-ntgr
May 13, 2017
Well I would also suggest making sure your backup is up to date.: ReadyNAS OS 6: Firmware Upgrade Guide and Tips

5 Replies

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mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired
May 13, 2017
Well I would also suggest making sure your backup is up to date.: ReadyNAS OS 6: Firmware Upgrade Guide and Tips
- StephenB
  Guru - Experienced User
  May 13, 2017
  Some of those things should be part of normal maintenance, and probably shouldn't be tied specifically to firmware updates
  
  monitoring disk and volume health
  
  documenting and backing up the system configuration
  
  The disabling/reenabling apps could be limited to upgrades when the kernel is being updated (though that does require some trust in the release notes).
  
  FWIW, these app failures show the need for something like docker, which has been on the idea exchange for a long time now.
  - NASguru
    Apprentice
    May 16, 2017
    StephenB wrote:
    Some of those things should be part of normal maintenance, and probably shouldn't be tied specifically to firmware updates
    monitoring disk and volume health
    documenting and backing up the system configuration
    The disabling/reenabling apps could be limited to upgrades when the kernel is being updated (though that does require some trust in the release notes).
    
    FWIW, these app failures show the need for something like docker, which has been on the idea exchange for a long time now.
    
    Too bad there isn't an option that allows us to routinely backup system logs and more importantly the system configurations. Note, the Alerts does have checked options for Disk failures and Volume issues but they are not real intuitive for most which is why the complete system logs are so important for support. And by complete I don't mean the logs you can grab with RAIDar but rather via the GUI. Anyhow, does anyone know if this is on the idea exchange already for automatic backup of logs/configurations? The only reason I mention it is due to all the inactive volume posts I've seen lately which includes myself after upgrading to 6.7.1 on my legacy NAS.
- btaroli
  Prodigy
  May 14, 2017
  It might not be a bad idea to LINK that article in every copy of the release notes. :D
  - mdgm-ntgr
    NETGEAR Employee Retired
    May 14, 2017
    We already do. We link to an article providing instructions to update the firmware. At the top of that article is a link to the KB I linked to above.