Support nightmare

[aaroncody]

After following the prompts to upgrade my ReadyNAS to firmware 6.6.0 I can no longer access the web admin page. I *can* SSH into the box though. The NAS looks healthy aside from the web admin page. I tried support but they refuse to elevate to L3 unless I give them my admin passwords, which isn't going to happen. What sysadmin would give out admin passwords to their system??? Why can't they call and walk me through diagnosing the problem from the SSH shell? We shouldn't have to hand out admin/root passwords to unknown support people.. ever .....

[DaneA]

Hi aaroncody,

It is necessary to provide the admin passwords in order for your case to be escalated to the Level 3 experts.  Since you are not confident to give your admin passwords, you may politely request for a scheduled call from the Level 3 expert on your preferred time.  Be sure to be available on the preferred time you've chosen for troubleshooting the NAS. 

Regards,

DaneA

NETGEAR Community Team

[mdgm-ntgr]

First make sure the 4GB root volume is not full.

# btrfs fi show
# df -h

If it is full the next step would be to free up some space on it.

Do you have any apps installed and/or packages installed via SSH? If so, which ones?

So you can't connect to the web admin page. Do you not even get a login prompt when going to https://ip.address.of.nas in your web browser?

Please check

# systemctl status apache2
# systemctl status apache2-safe

If apache2 fails to start it should fall back to the apache2-safe service which should pretty much invariably successfully start.

What status is showing in RAIDar? Is it indicating that the management service is offline? If so, that would suggest some additional things to check.

[aaroncody]

4GB root volume is nowhere near full.. aside from this, RAIDAR reports system is healthy

apache2 isn't coming up:

root@miramar-nas:~# systemctl status apache2.service
● apache2.service - The Apache HTTP Server
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/apache2.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sun 2016-11-27 10:01:20 PST; 16s ago
Process: 5234 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/apache2 $OPTIONS -k start (code=exited, status=203/EXEC)
Process: 5145 ExecStartPre=/frontview/bin/fvapps (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Nov 27 10:01:19 miramar-nas systemd[1]: Starting The Apache HTTP Server...
Nov 27 10:01:20 miramar-nas systemd[1]: apache2.service: Control process exited, code=exited status=203
Nov 27 10:01:20 miramar-nas systemd[1]: Failed to start The Apache HTTP Server.
Nov 27 10:01:20 miramar-nas systemd[1]: apache2.service: Unit entered failed state.
Nov 27 10:01:20 miramar-nas systemd[1]: apache2.service: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies.
Nov 27 10:01:20 miramar-nas systemd[1]: apache2.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

[aaroncody]

re: you may politely request for a scheduled call from the Level 3 expert on your preferred time.

I politelty requested this several times on the chat but whoever I was chatting to was adamant that this was NOT an option.......

[mdgm-ntgr]

You didn't answer my question:

Do you have any apps installed and/or packages installed via SSH? If so, which ones?

Did you do an apt-get upgrade? That can break things.

This is not normal. The apache service shouldn't fail to start. If it fails to start it falls back to a safe mode that should work in 99.9% of cases. So there's something rather strange going on on your system.

So it would be helpful to know what unusual circumstances may have caused the issue.

Have you checked the output of the following?:

# journalctl -a --no-pager --lines 5000 _SYSTEMD_UNIT=apache2.service

It would be easiest to have a remote look at your system to investigate a problem like this.

To get a call from L3 you would require an OnCall contract. Typically the L3s will only call if there is an OnCall contract and there is a problem they decide they need to discuss on the phone (some things are easier to discuss over the phone than via email).

Our OnCall support contracts don't cover mishaps through use of SSH.