URGENT, 4.1.13 software is also getting corrupted

[grunnsat]

After I reported that the 4.1.12 software is getting corrupted over time, I have now also experience 4.1.13 corruption.

The symptoms are very simple to detect:

• Raidar will not show the firmware version at the big blue i button


• The frontview page will also not show a normal software version like 4.1.13, only a hexa-decimal code between square brackets.

The only solution to fix the problem is to reinstall the software. The only problem is that with one Readynas Duo this doesn't work either, the Readynas will return in the same status. The only way to shutdown this Duo is with the on/off button, it is not possible to reboot from Frontview.

Please tell us what to do, because one of these days the data be be gone as wel!!

[StephenB]

What was the outcome of the PMs with mdgm in October?

[grunnsat]

No that much I'm afraid. According to him the protections on some directories were wrong and he fixed them.

By the way, reinstalling software is only possible from local. When you try to reinstall from the Netgear/Readynas site, the update screen will show a software version from 1970 and will claim that this is the latest version.

[StephenB]

Did he check to see if the OS partition was full? (I imagine he did, just checking).

Also, if you don't have an up-to-date backup, make one right away.

[grunnsat]

I don't know if he made that check.

Making a backup is easier said than done. It is not so easy to backup some 3TB of data.

[StephenB]

Yes, it takes some expense ann time to back things up. But you will lose data if you don't - it is just a matter of when.

In your case that might be sooner rather than later, since something is clearly broken.

[mdgm-ntgr]

Might be worh taking another look at your system if you are willing.

[grunnsat]

Of course, that would be a great idea.

I do think there is a problem with a partition, I see a lot of these reports in the system log:

---------Jan 2 13:41:49 readynas-01 syslogd: /var/log/auth.log: No space left on device

To give you an idea, the system log is 2.7 MB (uncompressed) and the UPnP log file reached over 1.1 MB in one day.

What is the size of the OS partition?

Luckily my brother's Duo just has some 350GB in use, so I can make a backup quite simple. I can then do a factory reset, update the system to 4.1.13, and restore the data.

Can I connect a drive to the USB port, and make the backup? That will not work with my system due to the 2TB limit.

[StephenB]

The OS partition size on the 4.1.x systems is 2 GB.

[grunnsat]

If I'm not mistaken the Linux swap space should be twice the RAM space, so 2GB in my case. So the swap space alone would take the whole OS partition.......

Is it possible that the OS partition has been calculated for the standard 256MB only?

[StephenB]

All the ReadyNAS use swap partitions.

The 2x memory guideline is an old rule of thumb, and I think is not really applicable anymore. The amount of swap space you need doesn't go up just because you have increased the amount of memory installed - it is related to the memory workload that is running on the system. For a given load, as you add physical memory the amount of needed swap space goes down, not up.

You can get a sense for what you need by running "free", or examining \proc\meminfo

Here's what it looks like at the moment on my NAS:

DUO v1 has 524192 KB of swap, 320 KB is in use.
NV+ v1 has 767904 KB (3 swap partitions - one for each non-parity drive?). 320 KB is in use.
Pro6 has 2096902 KB, 37MB is in use- perhaps due to CrashPlan. (Newer NAS, including the Pro and the OS6 products also have 4 GB OS partitions)
RN102 has 523964 KB, none of it in use.

[grunnsat]

In principle I agree with you, however there are operating systems that just demand a certain size of swap space in relation to the internal memory. My Windows laptop for instance has 32GB of memory, but I doubt if I ever used more than 12GB. Never the less Windows allocated 32GB swap space, and even recommends 48GB.........

You did not mention how much memory your DUO and NV+ have, my NV+ and DUO both have 1GB RAM. I don't know if Linux actually uses the size of the internal memory to calculate swap partitions for itself.

[StephenB]

Linux isn't windows, and doesn't demand swap space.

My duo and NV+ are stock (256 MB).

I believe nothing here is automatic, the partition structure created at the time of install determines the swap space.
If the extra memory you added was to increase RAID performance, than it is simply disk caching (which is not swapped). If you added a lot of applications, you might have also increased the memory load of the system.

Again, you can see how much swap space you have, and how much is in use by simply running free (which requires ssh of course).

Though there are some posts from folks who discovered that their memory upgrades stopped working properly in some of the new releases (4.1.10 and later) - viewtopic.php?t=69648, viewtopic.php?t=66897 If you still have stock memory, maybe try reinstalling that? Though your symptoms appear to be different.