Last night I upgraded my reliable old RN104 to a RN426. I thought it would be worthwhile documenting what happened for future reference. In short everything went quite well, but with a few issues that could have caused some problems.
The good: I unpacked the 426, what a lovely looking thing. First thing I did was put a single old drive into it, connect it to my network, and upgrade the firmware to the latest version - more importantly the same version as what the RN104 was running (6.10.3). Then I took a quick copy of my config and held my breath....
... shutdown both devices gracefully. I then took drive 1 out of the 104, and placed it into bay 1 of the 426 (that's the top one FYI), and proceeded to do the same for each disk. Then I turned it on. After a couple of minutes booting the new 426 is on my network, all my shares are back, users, name, everything! Awesome!
The less good: after happily checking shares, etc I notice one strange problem. All of the icons for the "featured apps" and Apps themselves are showing as broken gifs, and I couldn't install any of them. Weird. I was very careful to make sure I wasn't running any aps on the old 104 after reading that could cause problems here (sorry - can't find the posts). After a little more digging I found this: //community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS-in-Business/App-icons-in-web-interface-broken/m-p/1322928 Very close to the same problem I have.
So time to brush off my linux and dig under the hood. First I had to enable ssh access on my new toy. This article helped: kb.netgear.com/30068/ReadyNAS-OS-6-SSH-access-support-and-configuration-guides
Then I tried what was listed as the solution in the above linked post. I was getting a similar error in the startup of apache2, but like
@ NesporBellisRM I was getting a "Cannot load /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so into server: /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32"" error
I had already tried the "apt-get update" solution suggested, and rebooting, and... well you get the idea. In the end the fix seemed to be to run: "apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5" as root. It did say that I was running a modified php.ini file and did I want to replace it. I chose to leave it alone.... and so far so good. The icons are back, apache seems to be working, and I can run Apps as intended.
Not entirely sure why my shiny new RN426 needed such open-heart surgery, but I guess it's because I moved the disks from the old 104. Of course for a complete linux newbie doing ssh,apt-get, etc would possibly be a show-stopper.
Hopefully this helps someone in the future. And if anyone can see an issue with what I've done please let me know!
## NOTE editied to break hyperlinks as I kept getting this post auto-rejected 😞 ##
## NOTE2 - keeps getting auto-rejected?!
Model: RN426|ReadyNAS 426 – High-performance Business Data Storage - 6-Bays
Not entirely sure why my shiny new RN426 needed such open-heart surgery, but I guess it's because I moved the disks from the old 104. Of course for a complete linux newbie doing ssh,apt-get, etc would possibly be a show-stopper.
The RN426 is an x86 platform, the RN104 is arm. Many apps are platform specific, and won't work after migration.
While the NAS does convert the packages it uses to the new platform (which is a neat trick btw), it doesn't convert the packages used by any installed apps. Normally I recommend uninstalling the apps before migration, and then reinstalling them afterwards.
Thanks for the reply - obviously I wasn't clear, but that is exactly what I did. There were no apps installed at all on the old 104 pre-migration. It was just after I migrated when I wanted to install Plex that the problem occured. I wish I knew why!?
Thanks for the reply - obviously I wasn't clear, but that is exactly what I did. There were no apps installed at all on the old 104 pre-migration. It was just after I migrated when I wanted to install Plex that the problem occured. I wish I knew why!?
It is a puzzle, and I don't think anyone here had run into this issue since that 2017 thread (until you of course). Migration from arm->x86 is of course tricky, since all the arm packages in the OS partition need to be replaced. The good news is that you were able to resolve it.
BTW, normally the OS partition of an x86 NAS is btrfs (like the data volume). The arm NAS use ext for the OS partition. When you migrate the disks from arm->x86, the NAS won't convert the file system, so your OS partition will still be ext. Personally I don't think this is a problem (and given the way btrfs handles free space, using ext for a 4 GB volume might actually be preferrable). Just something you should be aware of.
I just ran an experiment moving a volume from an RN102 to an RN312, both running OS6.10.3, and this did not occur. So, I don't think is a systemic problem, just a one-off for this user, who fortunately has the Linux knowlege to fix it.
