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OS 6.6 on Ultra 6:. Not ready for prime time? Do I need more memory? Or...?
TL;DR version: OS 6.6 is worryingly unpredictable/unstable on my Ultra 6. Do I just need to expand the memory past the stock 1 GB, or is OS 6 still not ready for prime time, at least on these older b...
Final update (I hope): I re-ran the upgrade from 4.2 to 6.6.1. The NAS has been working perfectly for over a week. What was different this time? (a) all disk were in place already, so no RAID expansion was needed; and (b) I went straight to 6.6.1, not 6.6.0.
I did order more memory, but haven't installed it; I'm still running the stock 1 GB. I wanted to replicate my previous issues first so I could verify whether increasing RAM alone would fix it. But the box has resolutely failed to show any issues at all: no hangups, no unexpected slowness, no failures to respond. I've tried things like running a scrub while launching backups and hitting the NAS with clients, and the system reacted more slowly when all that was going on, but even so: it all worked, and the scrub of 8.8 TB finished within 48 hours (as did the initial full backup, before I started the stress test). Incremental backups run as quickly now as they did on OS 4.
So I either had a subtle corruption during the initial upgrade, or stuffing two new disks in and expanding the volume triggered the problems. But it wasn't low RAM, apparently, and OS 6 seems to be running fine despite my best attempts to break it. I'm going to label it "bug report closed: cannot replicate."
As for the apparent mislabeling of the System and CPU temperatures? I edited /etc/frontview/sensors/ULTRA6.conf and swapped the "System" and "CPU" labels for temp2 and temp3, ran "systemctl restart readynasd", and now the readings in the web UI match the values I expected from version 4.2 (I got the idea from this thread: <https://community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS/ReadyNAS-4200V2-OS6-6-1-fan-control/m-p/1219655#U1219655>).
I have an Ulta 6 too. Running OS 6.6.1 flawless.
I have 6 2TB WD Green drives installed.
The mainHW difference with your configuration is that I have upgraded the memory with an extra 1GB RAM.
So I'm running with 2 1GB memory banks with the same (original ULTRA 6) specifications.
I'm not running any big batches.
I do use DLNA / Streaming features, have MySQL with Owncloud running.
The system fan is permanently running on the quit level (app. 1015 RPM),
The CPU temp is at 35 C / 95F; the sytem at 40C / 104F; the disks are on average at 27C / 80F.
Everything is connected to an APS UPS Smart 1000.
Thanks very much to all who replied! It's good to know that OS 6 can run well on Ultra 6s, even if that hasn't been my experience.
- Logs were sent to mdgm, but there weren't any apparent smoking guns as I never heard anything back.
- I kept getting hangups where various services stopped responding, typically within a few hours of a reboot.
- Several times, the "reboot -f" required to restart the system resulted in the message "Remove inactive volumes to use the disk. Disk #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6." and all the drives on the Volumes page were shown in red. Rebooting again from the web UI restored normal ops, but the overall experience was not encouraging.
- Finally, a hangup occurred such that even ssh access was lost. A back-panel power-switch reboot was done, resulting in the "Remove inactive volumes" state; a subsequent reboot resulted in two inactive volumes: data, and data-0, which further rebooting didn't resolve. Oh, dear!
I could have continued to collect data in an attempt to troubleshoot further, but I had real work to do and NAS-nannying was taking up too much of my time, so four days ago I rolled back to OS 4.2, restored my saved configuration, and restarted my backups. The required resyncs and volume expansions ran under six hour each (not the 180-some hours that OS 6 predicted, but never had a chance to run to completion); the full backup of 8.8 TB of data ran in about two days, and the box is rock-solid stable again.
Might more memory have made the difference? The existing 1 GB memory tested fine, and that amount has worked well in both my Ultra 6s for years. I re-checked memory utilization on both boxes running OS 4 when running large backup jobs and both use about as much swap under OS 4 as the test box did under OS 6, so it's unlikely to be memory exhaustion and swapping per se that's the issue, unless OS6 has introduced new bugs in that regard.
Why my test box failed to behave well on OS 6 while others work fine remains a mystery. But I need my NASes to Just Work, and on OS 4 they do Just Work. Yes, I'll have to do a Factory Reset when I hit certain expansion limits, but I'll live with that inconvenience in return for the rock-solid reliability I've come to expect from OS 4 (not only on my two Ultra 6s, but on the two Pro 6s I set up at my former place of work). "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" turned out to be the right answer in my case.
The good news is that the rollback from OS 6 to OS 4 went flawlessly and my backup NAS is restored to its role as a solid, stable server. It's pretty cool that this box could be updated to an unsupported OS, and even cooler that it could be rolled back, none the worse for wear: mad props are due to mdgm, AMRivlin, and others involved in making these upgrades/rollbacks possible.
Thanks again, all!
Nothing stood out to me looking at your logs. Of course the Ultra 6 does have half the memory that we shipped with the OS6 x86_64 unit with the least memory.
Mine also has 2GB of RAM, so maybe that is the answer.
More memory might be the solution; indeed, it's the one consistent thing emerging as a difference between the people running OS 6 successfully on Ultras and myself, who was not so successful.
Sadly I wasn't able to find any information during my test period to indicate that more memory was useful other than for performance reasons: no one said, "you do need more memory to run OS 6", nor could I find any posts that indicated that someone had actually done the experiment of running OS 6 on both 1 GB and on 2+ GB, and seen a difference. So, rather than easter-egg it further—I needed to get the NAS back into service so I could expand my other one—I went back to what I knew worked.
Now I'm getting close to running into the 8 TB expansion limit on my main NAS, so I may swap them in the near future once my schedule allows for a Factory Reset, and try the experiment again with more RAM. If so I'll report back.
Thanks again!
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