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RN104 - ReadyNAS - Firmware stuck in 'booting'...
During an update of an RN104's firmware today, from 6.1.8 to 6.10.2 (yes, I know it's quite a jump...) - It has failed to boot up - it is stuck on 'Booting' on the LCD. I'm making preparations to...
Chris-Wiltshire wrote:
During an update of an RN104's firmware today, from 6.1.8 to 6.10.2 (yes, I know it's quite a jump...) - It has failed to boot up - it is stuck on 'Booting' on the LCD.
Were you going through the needed steps?
That is, 6.1.8 -> 6.2.5 -> 6.5.2 -> 6.10.2
https://kb.netgear.com/000061280/ReadyNAS-OS-6-Software-Version-6-10-2 wrote: ReadyNAS 102, 104, and 2120 systems must not be updated directly to 6.10.x from 6.3.x or older firmware. They must first be updated to either 6.2.5 or 6.3.5 then to 6.5.2 and then to 6.10.x.
Make sure you use 6.2.5 in your USB recovery attempt.
After 6.2.5 is installed, follow these instructions before manually installing 6.5.2: https://kb.netgear.com/29974/ReadyNAS-OS-6-RN100-RN2120-cannot-update-due-to-invalid-checksum
Chris-Wiltshire wrote:
If there is a tech on here who wants to run through some checks with me before I do this, then I'll be in a position to interact and provide information tomorrow morning NZ time (from 09:30 UTC+1300)
This isn't a Netgear support forum - it's a community forum. If you are interested in paid Netgear support, you can get that via my.netgear.com
I'm so very grateful for your detailed recommendations and the links that you provided, that was super helpful. USB recovery worked to get it to 6.2.5, and from there I was able to use the GUI to proceed.
I did appreciate that this was community support, but had seen prevoiusly that others, as you were - were kind enough to provide very useful and detailed advice.
I very much appreciate your help.
PS - just to provide a little more context as to how I got into this mess. ...
This NAS is not internet connected (normally), and so the inbuilt 'Check for Updates' function never worked. I had already downloaded 6.10.2 and had it available to upload manually, but had not appreciated the necessary step-through requirements of interim versions.
Yes, I should have read the release notes more thoroughly... Anyway, that's how it happened.
Cheers for the help.
I'm glad you got through it. Unfortunately it is easy to miss the need for the intermediate installs. It would have been better if Netgear had put a check in the update installs to prevent people from doing it accidentally. Though I don't think there are very many folks running firmware that old now.
FWIW, Netgear did make some adjustments to the BTRFS file system after 6.1.8. If you do a factory default, set up the NAS again, and reload the files from backup, then you should see an increase in performance. I think I saw a jump from about 35 to 70 MB/s read speeds when I did this (testing large file speeds with NAStester: http://www.808.dk/?code-csharp-nas-performance ).
Though the speed does depend on the SMB protocol being used (and in the case of SMB 3, if transport encryption is enabled). My own results testing this are here: https://community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS-in-Business/Average-transfer-speed-read-and-write-plummeted-after-replacing/m-p/1719222#M178329
Chris-Wiltshire wrote:
This NAS is not internet connected (normally), and so the inbuilt 'Check for Updates' function never worked.
One thing I do want to mention is that Netgear does sometimes push hot fixes silently. If the NAS isn't internet connected, you of course won't be getting those. Sometimes they matter, so if you do see misbehavior you might check here to see if a hot fix was done. I don't know of any way to manually install them, you'd need to allow your NAS to connect to the internet for a while to get them.
Thanks again for the detailed and useful response.
The lack of internet connectivity for that NAS was more of a lasting oversight than a deliberate step. - I think we will move to allow traffic out from that IP in the coming weeks to give it a fighting chance at remaining patched. Clearly it has been overlooked for some time, more so than my own personal RN104 in my home environment (which is how I knew that 6.10.2 applied well and created no new issues - elsewhere). :)
Your speed comments are incredibly interesting and wow, what an amazing difference in performance. The majority of the usage for this particular NAS is iSCSI through to VMWare for backup-to-disk, before duplication to tape. So the protocol comments around SMB are not directly relevant to that unit, but the BTRFS comments might well be?...
The problem I'd have would be less around restoring contents to the NAS as it's largely a scratch drive (given the above usage), once things are shifted off onto tape, the disk based storage is more for convinience than anything else. So dropping and re-creating the setup perhaps wouldn't be too much of an issue for us.
I wonder how much of your speed increase was down to the 'restored content' being perhaps a little more sequentially written than the previous content happened to be? If you wiped and restored it, then there's a pretty decent chance that it may have been significantly more contiguous?
Anyway, again, thanks heaps for the contribution and sharing your knowledge. You're a real credit to the community here. - Cheers.
Chris.
Chris-Wiltshire wrote:
I wonder how much of your speed increase was down to the 'restored content' being perhaps a little more sequentially written than the previous content happened to be? If you wiped and restored it, then there's a pretty decent chance that it may have been significantly more contiguous?
NASTester creates a file when you run it, then does several write tests, followed by several read tests. When done, the file is deleted. So I don't think the performance boost was about fragmentation.
Somewhere along the line, Netgear said that they had made some changes that would result in a performance boost if you did a factory default - but I don't recall exactly when. So I am thinking it was somehow related to the on-disk structure of the file system.
I happened to be part of the closed beta testing before the RN100 was released, and my volume was created by the beta software. So it was very old, and that might also have been a factor. But I did see some other users who reported significant gains. You might not see those gains with iSCSI - it's not something I use, so I didn't test that.
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