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Forum Discussion
How to boot a Debian Live environment with active SSH on a ReadyNAS with no display or console
During my research for my project on installing OMV on an Intel-based ReadyNAS without the need for a console connection, I discovered GRML, which can serve as a Debian Live boot with SSH access on a...
Seems I did something I can no longer repeat -- gotta do some experiments. This should work on native OS6 units, but does seem to have a problem with legacy units. Stay tuned.
Mine is native OS6, RN628X.
I went back and tried the USB recovery disk created with os6-recovery-tool-v2.0.r17. That doesn't work either. I went back to BIOS and there are two entries:
Kinstondatatravler
UEFI: Kingstondatatraveler partition 1
I tried to force RN628 manually boot from either of these two, and none of them boots.
Anything wrong with my RN628X?
The creation was fairly simple, I couln't make mistake.
1, plug in USB and poweron
2, press and hold the "OK" center button of the navigation panel
the screen stuck at "booting..." and never booted.
It is the same if I manually force to boot within the bios.
any clue?
Never mind, i figured it out. It was the USB drive itself. The readyNAS is very picky with the USB drives. I found a couple of 2Gb capacity ones and both worked.
Sandshark, I played with GRML and found the latest release doesn’t boot on some readynas hardware. The last 2025 release did work.
If all you want is remote SSH, Parted Magic has default SSH server enabled. It is not free. the older versions work too, has smaller ISO file size which is good for smaller USB drives. I believe the default password is partedmagic
Thanks but the whole point of this is being sat in another Linux installer, as part of installing an alternative OS, or perhaps attempting repair. The addition of SSH in remotely is to aid copy and paste etc, rather than driving the console. Using another boot media for the repair use case may or may not have the tooling support needed.
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