Automatic ReadyOS upgrade? Location of ReadyOS software

[jdfoxmicro]

Hello,

I had an RN3138 we'll call RN3138-1, running 6.9.4.  For some reason, if I clicked "Check for updates" in the web UI, it only showed 6.9.5 available, even though 6.10.2 is current.  I had to replace RN3138-1, so I had RN3138-2 ready.

RN3138-2 had a sticker showing "6.8.0" on it, and I figured that meant it had that version in its flash storage.  I booted it without a hard drive, and RAIDar saw it and showed OS 6.8.0, but it wouldn't let me get into the admin settings with no hard drive present.

So, I took one hard drive from the RAID array from RN3138-1, and put it in RN3138-2 just to get it going.  It started up, and it had all the settings from RN3138-1 (including host name, iSCSI targets, the user accounts, apps settings), but RN3138-2 was now running OS 6.10.2!  How?  I checked, and the setting to automatically upgrade was not turned on.

I pulled the remaining drives out of RN3138-1, and put the one hard drive from RN3138-2 back in it, and now RN3138-1 was running OS 6.10.2.

Does anyone have insight on what happened?  Does the ReadyNAS maybe connect to the Internet on its very first startup and upgrade the OS to the latest, and if it can't reach the Internet it just copies what it has on the flash storage?

Jeffrey Fox

[Sandshark]

I have seen nearly the same behavior twice on rack mount systems booted without a hard drive.  I reported it here, and the reply from the mods was that it "is not possible".  Perhaps now, they will listen a little more.  I believe there is something different about how the rack mount systems address their flash memory that does make it possible.

Here is what I believe happened:  Your original NAS didn't see 6.10.2 because you have it set to only look for "Long Term Support" upgrades, 6.9.5 being the last of those on the server (though I believe 6.9.6 should be).  When you booted the new NAS diskless, it auto-updated the flash to the latest, that being 6.10.2 since there was no installed system to tell it to only look for "Long Term Support".  Then, when you put the drive in, the NAS updated it because the version in the flash was newer.  If you put that drive back i the original NAS, it may update it to 6.10.2, too.

Lesson I learned:  If you don't want a rack mount system to auto-update the flash, and you have a reason to boot diskless, pull the Ethernet cable until the boot completes, or use another method to isolate it from the internet and the Netgear update server.

If you really don't want 6.10.2 on the second NAS, AFAIK, you can safely use a scrratch drive and revert.  Reversions are not recommended on active systems, but everything I see looking at the flash content says the flash OS image is completely over-written and as long as you factory default afterward, going backwards is fine.

You'll probably have to wipe out the OS partition on the updated drive and l;et it re-sync to insure it doesn't update everything to 6.10.2.