Yes, the OS that's in use completely resides on the drives, in a separate partition.
@whartonw: Note the OS reinstall doesn't reinstall the entire OS on the drives, so it might not resolve your problem. But as @Sandshark says, it is worth a try.
Progress Report: Installed and synched 3rd disk (I am just putting in random harddrives that are not being used at the moment, various capacities and brands) and all appeared well, so I put in disk #4 and it's syncing, and everything appears normal. No Ethernet issues, or anything else!
Plan is, if this all goes well, to reinstall the original disks, the ones that were mounted when the network crashed; if everything works, then do nothing (except scream, loudly and long). If the network crashes, try to discover, by trial and error, if one particular drive is the problem; if so, replace it with a new one and resync. If I can't isolate one problem-causing disk, then try the OS reload and go from there.
If I can't isolate one problem-causing disk, then try the OS reload and go from there.
FWIW, I don't think the issue is being caused by hardware (or any of the disks per se). I think there is something going on in the software running in the OS partitions.
As of about 20 minutes ago, the 424 is back up, populated with the original disks, and all appears to be fine. I have wired Ethernet connections and everything!
I want to formally thank both of you for the time and thought you put into this issue.You helped guide my analysis and troubleshooting and saved me much time and effort.
I also feel like I owe you apologies for what turned out to be, I guess, a waste of time, however, I don’t know how it could have been avoided.Although I rebooted the NAS when the crash first happened, that did not solve the problem then.
The system is now back to the exact state it was when everything crashed, and appears to be running normally; the only things that were done in the interim were a couple of shutdowns and the companion re-boots, re-populating the disk drives in-between, first with a new set of disks and next, with the original disk set.
BTW, I double checked, and there are only two apps running on the device, the built-in backup routine and the built-in anti-virus routine; no third-party apps are running on the device.
I am afraid the current group of coders is from the generation of kids that grew up receiving trophies for merely showing up, and with no consequences for tasks not done correctly the first time.Do-overs were the norm rather than the exception.And it appears this same generation has already moved up to the supervisory level as well.
Maybe I am a simply a victim of the “Complainer About the Younger Generation” syndrome, but the differences between my generation of programmers and the current one are stark, and not for the better.We put men on the moon and got them home safely with Hollerith punched-cards, magnetic tape storage, 32,000 (not 32,000,000) bytes of memory and no CPU cycles to waste; no do-overs, just lots and lots of testing before the system went live.Our routines had to fit into now-infinitesimal amounts of memory, and we never re-booted to solve a problem — we single-stepped through the routine, found the problem, and fixed the code — novel, right?Plus, we didn’t leave the de-bugging to the user!
Today, by comparison, the resources at-hand seem endless to me:near-infinite amounts of memory and storage, and CPU cycles so fast you don’t even have to think about them.
And yet, with all this, the software product that goes to market for the most part simply doesn’t work, at least not at first. And of all the hardware with which I have experience, the software that makes it usable from Netgear seems to be the worst.
During our NAS troubleshooting, Stephen and Sandshark, I have also been trying to get my Orbi mesh network to re-pair; the router just spontaneously lost connections with its two satellites.The re-pairing process, according to Netgear, is to perform Step A, Step B, then Step C, which I carefully did, and this yields Result D — except it doesn’t.And there’s no hint about what to do when D is not the result.You are left simply to Repeat A through C, over and over, which was Einstein’s definition of insanity:doing the same thing over and over, again and again, expecting a different result.
Somebody should hang a poster with the Einstein definition on the walls at Netgear.
Re: Migrating disks backward from OS 6 to RAIDitor 4.2
Glad I could help. I don't know anything of mesh wifi systems, so I'm no help there.
I feel your pain RE: the "rant". Having spent 40 years in Fortune 100 corporations and counting the months to retirement real fast, I have a similar view. But I also blame a lot on management. They no longer come from the engineering and production environments, they are MBA's who have no idea what their employees do and believe the crap they learned from professors who have never worked in industry a day in their lives that every business can be run like any other. They strive to maximize the stock price to which their bonus is tied, not customer or employee satisfaction. Why the first isn't tied to the latter befuddles me, but that's why I'm not as rich as Warren Buffett. That drives the rest of the employees, especially the younger ones who have never known anything different, to give them what they want: quick, half-assed but flashy products and updates. As my aunt from Georgia used to say, "lipstick on a pig".
I have no inside knowledge of Netgear, but the output I see from them reeks of that kind of environment. But I stick with the devil I know.
I do have an Orbi RBK50 setup. Though the mesh issue (whatever it is) should be pursued in the Orbi forum area.
I'll go to the Orbi forum if I can't get it done myself.
I was just trying to say that all this gear I have was intended to be used as tools to do my real job, which is running the house, taking care of our finances, and feeding my photography habit, but, because of the issues about which I was ranting, instead, I spend almost all of my time being an IT specialist. I am not happy about that.
Glad I could help. I don't know anything of mesh wifi systems, so I'm no help there.
I feel your pain RE: the "rant". Having spent 40 years in Fortune 100 corporations and counting the months to retirement real fast, I have a similar view. But I also blame a lot on management. They no longer come from the engineering and production environments, they are MBA's who have no idea what their employees do and believe the crap they learned from professors who have never worked in industry a day in their lives that every business can be run like any other. They strive to maximize the stock price to which their bonus is tied, not customer or employee satisfaction. Why the first isn't tied to the latter befuddles me, but that's why I'm not as rich as Warren Buffett. That drives the rest of the employees, especially the younger ones who have never known anything different, to give them what they want: quick, half-assed but flashy products and updates. As my aunt from Georgia used to say, "lipstick on a pig".
I have no inside knowledge of Netgear, but the output I see from them reeks of that kind of environment. But I stick with the devil I know.
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I grew up hearing about that same pig!
We are on the same page. I believe the environment you describe is aided and abetted, if not caused by, all the hedge funds buying the IT companies and the fact that they are only interested in how much profit they can book by next Friday.
All problems seem to have been cleared up. Someone at Netgear Support, Kristofer, suggested disabling IPv6 on the 424, which stopped the crashing of the wired connections at the router. Problem apparently solved.
Not long after this, the 424 began to simply vanish from my network. After a lot of trouble-shooting, another Netgear support type, Joe, suggested I disable the anti-virus scans. (one of you suggested this earlier in this thread because of low memory concerns, but I failed to heed the suggestion in the middle of all the other things we were trying. Mea culpa.) Problem #2 solved.
Fingers crossed, but all seems to be working now.
Many thanks again for the time you spent working with me on these issues. You both are real assets to the Community.
