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Remote access for Netgear Support
Hi,
This is a question for the Netgear folks really but I was wondering whether the Netgear support team would connect to a device via SSH or HTTPS if the user / customer provided connection details and credentials.
The reason for this ask is I am out of the country for a couple of weeks one of my clients uses a ReadyNAS solution. In the even they called me due to a system issue, if I were to be able to provide support access via SSH / HTTPS would that be allowed as opposed to using the tech support boot option? Of course this only applies if the system is up.
Very unlikely I would need to use this but wanted to check.
Thanks...
We have a Secure Diagnostics Mode that can be enabled if the http/s service is running. We've configured a safe mode fallback so the https service should remain running unless there is a crash or it was forced off by an Out of Memory condition (OOM is caused by a memory leak - a process uses too much memory so the system has no choice but to forcibly shutdown processes). This is preferable to tech support mode in most cases.
For some problems you do need the system to be running normally to diagnose effectively.Secure Diagnostics Mode can be enabled even if the management service is offline unless you're still running ancient 6.1.8 or earlier firmware (which you shouldn't be).
On 6.1.x and earlier Secure Diagnostics Mode was called Remote Access SSH. Some users didn't seem to realise this was SSH for support only so we renamed it to something a bit more obvious.
Tech support mode is a low level diagnostic mode useful for diagnosing a wide range of problems. In tech support mode the RAID has to be manually started, the OS and volume manually mounted etc. For some problems tech support mode is necessary.
On older ReadyNAS we have the Remote Access SSH add-on as an alternative to tech support mode.
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There's also the secure diagnostic mode that you enable in system->settings.
I believe both tech support mode and secure diagnostic mode give Netgear a linux commmand line interface.
We have a Secure Diagnostics Mode that can be enabled if the http/s service is running. We've configured a safe mode fallback so the https service should remain running unless there is a crash or it was forced off by an Out of Memory condition (OOM is caused by a memory leak - a process uses too much memory so the system has no choice but to forcibly shutdown processes). This is preferable to tech support mode in most cases.
For some problems you do need the system to be running normally to diagnose effectively.Secure Diagnostics Mode can be enabled even if the management service is offline unless you're still running ancient 6.1.8 or earlier firmware (which you shouldn't be).
On 6.1.x and earlier Secure Diagnostics Mode was called Remote Access SSH. Some users didn't seem to realise this was SSH for support only so we renamed it to something a bit more obvious.
Tech support mode is a low level diagnostic mode useful for diagnosing a wide range of problems. In tech support mode the RAID has to be manually started, the OS and volume manually mounted etc. For some problems tech support mode is necessary.
On older ReadyNAS we have the Remote Access SSH add-on as an alternative to tech support mode.
Thanks for the detailed answer...
Is there any value in having the secure diagnostics enabled all the time for a server in a remote location? From what you have said it should always be possible to enable this mode providing the device has not crashed / ran out of memory.
One thing that does scare me about the OS6 / BTRFS based NAS's is the inability for a user to perform file system checks etc. I've heard some horror stories about BTRFS. I recall on the same clients Pro 6 having a call one afternoon where the volume was inaccessible. I simply logged in via SSH and observed that the EXT4 filesystem had been mounted RO due to an FS issue. I simply unmounted it, ran e2fsck and all was well... If the same were to happen on BTRFS I'd be at a loss.
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