RNOS 6.10.x is based on Debian Jessie, which officially EOL'd in June 2020. (I know, right? I could have sworn 2020 got stuck on March all year.) Jessie is currently "oldoldstable", which means it'll drop off the upstream repositories when Bullseye releases on 14 August 2021 (at time of writing, that's less than two weeks away). For bonus damage, the current RNOS apt repo is broken - the "readynasos" package includes an empty "Depends:" line which the versions of apt and aptitude in Jessie cannot handle.
Since it seems clear that a stock RNOS image based on something more modern isn't forthcoming any time soon, has anyone tried upgrading to a more recent release? I imagine most packages would have only the usual teething issues, but I'm concerned as to whether there are any custom binaries that aren't included in Debian and would potentially pose ABI issues if the kernel and system libraries got upgraded around them.
Model: RN10400|ReadyNAS 100 Series 4- Bay (Diskless)
There are custom binaries, but I do not know in what way (if at all) they are used by the GUI. The GUI itself is yet another issue. And at least some packages may have been modified before compilation (NUT seems to be one of them).
If a comunity upgrade path is ever to exist, Netgear is going to have to release some code. The other option would be to throw it all away and start from scratch, but I think that's more difficult on the native OS6 units than it was on RIADiator units.
I've done some experimenting with trying to bring the box up to Stretch. Here's what I've found:
The NG Apache build includes a couple of custom or optional modules that aren't shipped in mainline Debian currently (mod_privsep and mod_authn_privsep), which will cause it to fail to start. I've not investigated further as to whether the functionality is now a core part of Apache or in another module, but either way that will need investigation.
I use Exim to ship mail, both for readynasd to use as a mail relay and for general local delivery - it uses another machine on the local network as a "smart host" which actually sends it out to the world. After upgrading as many of the dependencies as I could find, the queue runner segfaults when trying to deliver mail to the smart host - in particular it's SEGV_MAPERR which suggests that there's still a library somewhere it's having trouble with, which I couldn't identify.
Once a whole bunch of core libraries have been upgraded, readynasd itself will segfault also because of a library incompatibility, which entirely kills the UI and may prevent the unit from booting in the first place.
I was able to revert to stock firmware using OS Reinstall in the boot menu, but this then left the dpkg status database hosed, which required restoring from /var/backups and reinstalling a bunch of packages to make the filesystem actually reflect the older database.
Since it seems the product line is EOL'd and the software apparently abandoned, it seems like it's going to be a lot of effort to continue maintaining what for me is now a 6 year old device, and I suspect that replacing it wholesale may be a better option.
