NAS204 offline...sort of

Hi, pjm2504.  Just another user here, and I don't use ReadyCLOUD, so take anything I have to say with a grain of salt.  Still, I happened to notice your post so I thought I would chime in.

Concerning being unable to access the shares on your ReadyNAS, it sounds like the samba daemon has gotten "confused" about your permissions.  It sounds weird, but this used to happen on our Pro 4 model (running the 4.x OS) from time to time.  Users would suddenly be unable to access shares, would have read-only access in shares where they should have read-write, etc.  (The problem would generally vary by user account, not by group.)  In our case, I used to address the problem by SSHing into the machine and restarting the samba daemon.  Everyone's access would go back to normal after that.

Concerning your device being reported as "offline", the ReadyNAS runs a service on itself that the admin tools communicate with to get the status of the ReadyNAS.  It sounds like the process that runs that service has become unresponsive.  (For instance, it may have hung or crashed.)  When the admin tools try to get the status of the ReadyNAS and don't get the expected response, they report that it is "offline".  Other services, such as file sharing, are run by separate, independent processes, so they can still be contacted by the programs that know how to talk to them.  This would explain why you can still use some functions of the ReadyNAS, despite it being reported as "offline".

From your description I don't think that you have SSH access to your machine, but rebooting the machine would obviously cause all of the processes to be restarted.  If your issues are just "random" problems with the processes on your machine, then rebooting should fix the problem.  (If some of the config files or parts of the OS have gotten corrupted, then you may have to take more drastic steps such as importing a backup of your server config or reinstalling the OS.)

If I was in your shoes, I would try rebooting the machine first, and then go from there.  (If you don't have backups of your data yet, be sure to backup the data from the shares that you still have read access to before doing anything else.  That way, if there is something really wrong with your machine and it doesn't come back up, you haven't lost everything.)  You should be able to gracefully shut down the machine, even if you don't have to the web admin page, by short-pressing the physical power button on the unit a couple of times.

Apologies if you already knew the things in my post, or have already tried rebooting the machine.  I thought I should post, though, just in case it might help.

Best of luck.