For me, there are just two important things at this stage: some candor (I think "transparency" is the buzzy term these days) and a path forward.
It's clear that Netgear hasn't had its heart in the ReadyNAS line for something close to three years, so it's best to just be upfront with current users and admit, yes, the entire product line has officially been discontinued. Internally, they've known this for a while. And with so much writing on the wall, I don't know which Netgear decison-maker(s) think all this caginess is benefitting them at this point. Maybe they think cowardliness is good business practice.
Even more crucially, we consumer and enterprise users need some migration tools or at least a migration strategy to a new long-term OS platform. From a hardware standpoint, there's no reason why many of these ReadyNAS units shouldn't last another decade. Competing brands are still selling similarly spec'd units.
The very least Netgear could do is therefore provide its users with a software tool to migrate an existing system to something like OpenMediaVault (also Debian-based) or FreeNAS, even if those OSes don't necessarily have feature parity with ReadyNAS OS. And/Or they could open-source ReadyNAS OS and let the developer community have at it.
Either route is preferable to just abandoning the product line and leaving users with vulnerable, outdated devices for storing their important files.
We need the drives / firmware of these devices open sourced so that if we do move over to another operating system, we can make use of the display/buttons on front of these devices and the hardware inside
The reason why they are not announcing it could maybe be that they first want to sell the remaining stock and get out of warranty of the remaining machines.
@SignedAdam wrote: We need the drives / firmware of these devices open sourced so that if we do move over to another operating system, we can make use of the display/buttons on front of these devices and the hardware inside
These units are effectively unlocked - no mysteries. Just connect a graphics card temporarily, and you'll see a regular BIOS screen, and will be able to boot whatever you want from an USB drive, and install it.
For example RockStor is designed exactly for headless systems like the RN's
The only reall loss for me is the front LED panel, which I still don't know how to control. Otherwise all other functionalities of ReadyNAS are covered by RockStor.
Model: RN626X|ReadyNAS 626X – 6 Bays with Intel® Xeon® Quad-Core Server Processor
RockStor! is only working on Intel and AMD CPUs its not for Sparc, ARM which are the majority of the ReadyNAS sold.
And even then there is, regarding to my research, no out-of-the-box solution for the Intel ReadyNAS like yours. You will have to tinker around and I also wasn't able to find a step-by-step solution how to , also the RockStor! staff couldnt offer a solution. They just said in their forum:"Try it and report us".
So overall RockStor! is not the solution for our problems, maybe for yours. But as far as I remember your NAS Model needs a lot of power and therefore most people stay away from that intel model or build something themselves.
The Sparc boxes are limited to 2 TB per HDD, not sure why. A new operating system could maybe be solving this problem as well. But Iam not sure if the hardware is a limitation.
But in the end we need a solution for the ARM/Sparc hardware, the few Intel boxes sold don’t really matter in the big picture. The power consumption of them is also so high that nobody really uses them anymore, at least as far as I know.
Performance wasn't competitive 10 years ago (which is why Netgear retired them). Trying to upgrade the software won't fix that.
FWIW, I have a Duo v1 and an NV+ v1 still in service as backup devices. I'll keep them going as long as they work, but I won't invest any money in fixing them.
I'm still searching around, but if anyone has a link to a current guide for installing any generic OS on to an x86 readynas, I would appreciate it (and no doubt future vistors too).
If there is no such guide, if anyone who has already worked their way through it, could consider posting some of the basic steps?
Personally I'm most interested in moving my RN hardware to truenas SCALE, or proxmox.
Just like you, I think that something needs to be done with the current situation, there are no real updates and, as I see, they are not expected, so I am also looking for options for switching to another platform .. Here is some interesting information on migration ..
Guys, I'm ready for experiments, but my skills are not enough for independent work on migration to TrueNas or other analogs, and even my knowledge of English does not give a correct understanding. I need instructions that are not available anywhere.
I am still hoping for someone who is willing and capable of to have a deeper look into the firmware and to program a new free OS.
https://xpenology.org/ is one option, but there is no way to revert back to OS-6, so I haven't tried it. If I want to go down that path in the future, I'd put it on an external USB drive, and boot up using that first.
While Netgear certainly could release OS-6 as open source somewhere, it seems unlikely.
