On waking up this morning, my ReadyNAS 312 sent me an email message that "capacity remaining is less than 10% and I should increase capacity" and then another message that "the system is shutting down". Rebooting produces the same result. I am sure that remaining capacity is only just less than 10% since I checked it yesterday and I have not added any significant files since then. Nevertheless, I would like to increase the headroom by removing some large files but my problem is that it is not possible to connect to the NAS either via the normal network file access to my shares or via the admin console. Although the ReadyNAS announced that it was shutting down, and it indeed acts as though it has shut down (ie. no communications) the hardware lights remain on. How can I access my shares to remove files and make more space?
Yes, I do have a power schedule set but these shutdowns are not related to the schedule. Just to be clear, the message sequence is:
Message 1.:
Less than 10% of volume data's capacity is free. Performance on volume data is degraded. To improve performance, you must add capacity.
And then 8 minutes later:
The system is shutting down.
The disks are WD Red 4TB about 1 year old. I don't believe I've had a disk failure but I can't be sure since I can't communicate with the NAS to find out. My problem is that the system won't communicate so I can't do anything. It doesn't shutdown as in a normal shutdown. It just doesn't communicate with the outside world.
I don't understand your backup question. Are you asking if I've backed up the NAS? The NAS is the backup server for my computers but I do regularly make backups of the NAS and I'm not fretting on loss of data. I am fretting on loss of function from my NAS. It is currently impersonating a boat anchor quite well.
I have tried several reboots, shutdown and restart, etc. I have not been able to establish any communication with the NAS. All attempts to connect to the admin console and/or to connect to the shares result in time-outs. The NAS appears to shut down and restart (as far as can be determined from the activity lights) but it never accepts any communications so who knows what it is doing. It does, however, send out further "warning" emails as described above.
OK. I can't explain all issues but I did determine that somehow the network was reset to default DHCP config rather than the Static address setup that I had set. Hence I could not communicate because I was looking at the wrong address (where I had been communicating for the last year). When I look at the sequence of messages that I received as email alerts I can, in hindsight, explain all but one alert. Only one shutdown message (the first) can not be explained. I'm willing to ignore the anomalies as unfortunate glitches given that having re-established normal communications, everything seems to be working properly again. So, thanks very much for your help guys. You may not have had enough info to solve the puzzle but your questions caused me to look in the right places.
One side benefit (?) of the process was that I did early on remove one of the disks and attempt to access its data outside of the NAS. In this I did not succeed, which has alerted me to the risk of a NAS h/w failure and I will now research this problem a bit more to better arm me for the future when some other more intractable problem may arise.
Thanks again for your help. (I think that's a kudos or two.)
