Yesterday my unit decided to stop responding - no share access, a blinking blue LED and painfully slow Frontpage via the web interface. When Frontpage did finally load it showed 100% usage of the disks, despite being at 94% a few days ago. Rather shocked (since no email warning had been sent to me by the unit), I really didn't know what to do...
The shares were showing up in Frontpage (although I NOW KNOW that a give-away indicator of the problem was that none of the CIFS or AFP, etc. icons were active - this isn't really apparent unless you use the share page often and notice this!), so I picked one I didn't mind losing (on the basis that this would reduce the 100% to 99% or so and make the unit work again) and deleted it.
However, after a short while I got an error on Frontpage (also emailed to me): "The paths for the shares listed below could not be found. Typically, this occurs when the ReadyNAS is unable to access the data volume.", followed by a list of the shares that should be available (minus the one I'd deleted). ARRGGHHH!!! All my data gone???
So I opted for a re-boot and ticked the options to check all the quotas and do a volume scan and left it overnight. The next morning nothing had changed - still no shares accessible via a Windows PC nor a Mac. Connecting via FTP failed (connection not possible, which was verified by a Telnet attempt), and the HTTP server wasn't running.
So I tried a "Resync volume" in the Volumes tab. My drives are both 2TB and I knew this would take a while... 17% in a message popped up saying that errors had been found ("Volume scan found and corrected errors") - and my 'Disk space' indicator at the top of the page had dropped back to 94%. I was tempted to leave it running, but opted for another re-boot (with no options ticked) in the hope my files were now there.
Nope - but still the usage remained at 94% so I was confident that the files would be accessible somehow. After looking at forum entries and thinking about removing a drive and using a SATA-USB cable and R-Linux to attempt to read the files, I happened to notice that the share I'd previously deleted had re-appeared. Odd. To me that implied that the original share list was a cache local to the processor, but it had now re-scanned the drives and noticed that the share was actually present. So, the processor had simply lost track of what was on the drive...
Knowing that FTP was the easiest to test (Telnet to port 21) I tried turning off the FTP protocol, and then back on again - it was now responding, but no real file access to shares. Likewise, I turned off the AFP protocol and back on again - this now showed up on my Mac with my name as the share (but no file/folder access). Odd, but getting somewhere. Finally, the missing piece of the puzzle, was to go back to the shares and re-enable CIFS and AFP for them. This finally gave me access to my files again, on both a PC and Mac.
Quite what happened yesterday to make the unit go awry I don't know. Something obviously got corrupted in the CPU's local settings, and only stopping and re-starting the protocols + re-enabling CIFS/AFP access for the shares fixed the issue. Doing so would have re-set the corrupted settings.
I hope this helps out someone else with similar issues - BUT maybe I was lucky and it might make things worse for others with a similar problem - you have been warned!
Anyway, now off to get a backup drive to plug in via USB (to avoid future stress) ... and maybe think about an upgrade, given that I'm getting ever-closed to 100% (for real this time). Any suggestions??
Re: ReadyNAS Duo (Sparc) "missing shares" - FIXED !!
Since you have an older NAS, you should probably check the OS partition fullness (which requires SSH). Alternatively delete the logs.
Running >90% disk capacity is going to hurt performance, and of course your duo isn't as fast as new NAS in the first place. So perhaps you should plan on getting a second NAS (since the duo is maxed).
