I have a client with a venerable ReadyNAS Pro6 in situ and wants it replaced.
I went with a ReadyNAS 516 hoping the migration between the two would be realitively simple (hey ! both readyNAS and surely clients are expected to migrate to newer models - right ?)
The system has many shares configured (around 45) The system has many users configured (around 40)
The system groups users into 6 groups
Authentication is by username and password
so ....
we buy a 516, do a confguration export from the Pro6 (running OS4) and attempt to import it into the 516 (running OS6)
it doesn't like this - basically loses most accounts !!!!
trying to restore the share structure is even worse !
Is there a way to migrate share structures, permissions/settings and user/group data between OS4 and OS6 without having to burn a large amount of time manually re-entering everything ?
Apologies for the disbelief and shock ..... but the decision to Upgrade the back end storage of the office is now going to cost a great deal more time, angst and energy than expected 😞
I understand the need for progress and progression in products - but as a user and someone who is now in hour 3 of manually recreating all settings, backup jobs, users, shares etc ..... (with many hours more to go thanks to the "non-optimal-for-bulk-data-entry" interface of OS6) and after having to factory reset the 516 three times after import ettempts ..... I also very much understand the need for some backward compatability or at least a migration tool to soften these "rare" events impacting critical product function.
Wearing my other hat (as a software engineer) I have to write migration kinds of tools for my clients when I perform a major upgrade to tools and products I support ..... I kind of hoped Netgear would offer the same courtesy 😞
Lesson learned (and now factored into future "upgrade" reccomendations)
You may also wish to post this suggestion in the Ideas Exchange
Most users with lots of users use AD, and a large number of ordinary shares is not a common deployment scenario.
We don't support installing OS6 on legacy systems (though it can be installed on the Pro 6 using a special image - a factory reset is required)
With the size of the change we also now have new and different settings for the new products.
If we were able to make a migration tool it would likely need regular updates to account for backend config changes in the new OS.
I would not expect a similar revolutionary change for quite some time, so I would expect once you have upgraded to the 516 migrating to a newer box again at some point in the future should be more straightforward. However I cannot predict what will happen in the future and would suggest you seek some pre-sales advice on the community about what would be involved in migration ahead of your future purchases.
As you state ..... ".... Most users with lots of users use AD, and a large number of ordinary shares is not a common deployment scenario."
It is for SME's who are growing and have not yet required an investment in AD. As in this case. Also (although not a "lot" of users in the system - but potentially a lot of shares depending on organisation) every home user without AD in their house (which is pretty much all of them less the extra tech savvy ones).
This is not my primary role but over the years I have installed (or reccomended then helped install) in SME's and homes in the area 5x516's (this is the first migrating from an OS4 predecessor), 2x316's, three Pro 6's, 4x NV+ (going back a while when they were new), a handfull of Duos and 3x 104's (Shudder). Not a lot by commercial standards but due to the size of the development cells, small businesses and homes in question NONE have used AD. I appreciate this is not a market segment the ReadyNAS is apparently targetting.
"....would suggest you seek some pre-sales advice on the community about what would be involved in migration ahead of your future purchases"
..... could not agree more .... thank you for the advice but in this case it is a week and $3500 late.
My sticking with a Netgear ReadyNAS solution in this case was based on a false premace (ease of transition). There are a lot of storage providers out there and pro's and cons of each. Netgear is not the cheapest nor the fastest nor the best supported apparently.
The effort penalty for changing vendors (usually a significant barrier for transition) is apparently the same as purchasing another ReadyNAS across the OS4 to OS6 boundary. I won't be reccomending the ReadyNAS family of products to anyone further who does not run AD in their business or home.
In the home or a lot of businesses that don't have AD you would have less users and shares than in your environment. Most home users would not use AD, but then they would also be likely to have under 10 users.
With a small number of users and shares, although manual reconfiguration does take some time it would be less than in your environment.
You can certainly have hundreds of users locally on a NAS if you want and large numbers of shares too, but manual reconfiguration (if ever required) of a new unit becomes more time consuming.
As I mentioned the revolutionary change in OS6 is highly unusual. Although there may be some pain in environments such as yours migrating across we felt the revolutionary changes we made would stand us in good stead for the future.
When you start with a relatively clean slate you can rethink how you do things that would have been too difficult otherwise.
Our latest new products released late last year are also running OS6. I don't expect us to make another revolutionary change anytime soon. For one thing we changed to using the BTRFS filesystem with OS6. I doubt there will be a newer, better filesystem to change to using anytime soon.
Migrating from an OS6 NAS to a newer OS6 NAS would be quite straightforward.
It is also worth noting that if a legacy x86 NAS (e.g. Pro 6) chassis happens to die, we have a procedure for moving the disks across to an OS6 x86 NAS (e.g. 516) for the purpose of booting off the disks so that the data can be backed up. This of course assumes the disks are fine and the OS, array and volume on the disks are fine.
We don't want to be the cheapest. The cheapest NAS options you'll probably find are somewhat lacking in development or support or performance or a combination of more than one of those. I've had a look at the GPL code for some cheap options and saw that some basic security updates for things like samba (What provides SMB i.e. Windows File Sharing) had not been applied despite having been available for a long time.
We care more about data integrity than being the fastest.
The 516 has a 5 year limited hardware warranty and lifetime (online) chat support. All our ReadyNAS come with 90 days phone support from the date of purchase with the option to purchase support contracts for those who need additional phone support. Some competitors don't offer phone support at all or if they do only in very limited markets.
I believe our support stacks up well against the competition. If you find you are unhappy with the support received on a case you can let me know the case number and any other details that are relevant and I'll have it reviewed.
I don't see anything here about technical support (at least not as I think of it).
The key issue for the OP was the lack of migration tools to speed/simplify configuration of the new NAS. For instance, if he could have exported shares/users/groups from the Pro6 into a spreadsheet and then imported the spreadsheet into the RN516 he would have saved a lot of time/labor.
I guess the question here for Netgear is whether providing such tools now (3 years after the OS 6 launch) is a project worth doing.
Interestingly, I just posted in the Idea Exchange that a method of moving users and groups from OS4.x to 6.x is desparately needed. More kudos and comments may help it get better recognition from Netgear. And you could add the need to migrate shares.
As for moving shares, I can see that being trickier. While OS4.x has the ability to save the share directory trees under system backupo, OS6 does not, so I assume it can't import them, either. And it doesn't seem to work right in 4.2.27, anyway. Either that or "It is limited to a combined total of 50MB." means it won;'t work at all if you have more than 50MB, not that it just includes the first 50MB of data.
Once you do re-create the share structure, you can use the Windows Timestamp copy from the OS6 system to copy volume c on the OS4.x system to volume data on the OS6 system, and check the box to change ownership of the files to the owner of the share. Use admin credentials so you have access to everything including user home folders. You can't use RSync or NFS because they are turned on/off by share, not volume. I'm not sure about AFP, as I don't use it, but it probably has the same limitation. That sure beats having to set up backup jobs for each individual share.
Just be careful and make sure you've created all the shares, including home shares, before you do the copy. Creating a directory in data will not make the NAS recognize that as a share, and once you've created the directory, you can't create a share by the same name. You'll have to use SSH to correct anything that goes wrong.
it's a two pronged issue and I agree .... some way to move from OS4 to OS6 would be awesome. even for a limited number of users you have
a) the user definition
b) the group definition
c) the shares
d) security policy for all shares related to the users
e) backup job(s) for all shares
So what I've just had to do is a) recreate all users
b) recreate all groups
c) recreate all shares ensuring security policies (visibility/ownership etc) are correct and the same as before
d) create backup jobs to rsync from the old machine to the new (first copy)
And again create backup jobs for when the box becomes the "live" NAS
e) recreate the backup jobs that backup to removable storage
f) recreate the backup jobs to rsync to the backup box.
and then
g) setup the ftp access for all FTP accessible shares from the list
all very time consuming and annoying ...... and a,b,c,e,f,g would not have been nescessary (or at least a lot easier) should the migration from OS4 to OS6 have been supported in some way.
even with only 40 users and 40 shares this is a lot of steps ((40+40) x 6 = 480 steps) via the clunky OS6 interface (default share ownership really annoying as it wants to give access privileges to the guest user by default)
I reject they should be able to ignre this as the change was years ago as it's only now the Pro6 boxes running OS4 will need replacing and I suspect more and more people will be hitting this issue. They will either go to OS6 manually or choose another vendor (no advantage to staying with the ReadyNAS family as the cost in time and effort to do so is the same).
Maybe Netgear should put a warning on new OS6 boxes - something like: "Warning: Migration of users, groups, shares, backups and other critical configuration data between OS4 and OS6 devices is a strictly manual process requiring an administrator to start from scratch and manually re-entering all NAS configuration data. Attempting to load configuration data from OS4 into OS6 is not supported and will have "unexpected" results if attempted. Please factor the time an effort required into any NAS upgrade decision process"
Well done for raising this in the Idea Exchange .....
.... too late for me now in this case - but as I am administering several other OS4 boxes that are ticking down to their inevitable death/replacement - it could be useful in the future (If I stay with Netgear ReadyNAS units that is, since they are reccomending the AD path maybe a more tailored/integrated turnkey solution will be sought)
.... As far as the "Three Years old" so why do anything arguement goes .... most people won't look for problems going from OS4 to OS6 till they are actually doing it ..... and as OS4 boxes are approaching or beyond useful life (and buying a like for like replacement is a challenge) then it's the next few years when migration tools will be needed most 😞 Whilst I agree with mdgm that the manual re-entry of config data into the OS6 box may present an opportunity to re-think the way things are being done and optimise .... that is not the case when you have an SME that needs a solution in place ASAP (i.e OS4 box on the way out and the SME can not afford to have staff twiddling their thumbs while a considered redesign occurrs) and there's no plan or budget for redesigning the storage array structure and educating all users as to changes.
IMHO providing no migration tools (and not even preventing the import of an OS4 config structure into the OS6 box - incidentally that kind of screws up the OS6 box it is loaded into) was a bit short sighted 😞
I wasn't necessarily recommending the AD path, but just pointing out that with large numbers of users it would be a more common choice for AD to be used rather than not. That doesn't mean that using AD would necessarily suit everyone and using local users with large numbers of users is supported.
I was just looking through our internal knowledgebase. Apparently you can import users manually via SSH.
I think you'd be looking at the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files noting that there may be some system defined users which are different on OS6 that you should allow for. Groups would be in /etc/group
Even though you are using local users with samba it is called a domain id map. The samba domain ID map would need fixing too.
If you export the domain ID map, you can run the following commands to import your ID map in the new ReadyNAS via SSH.
Place the domain ID map in your data volume via SMB and then replace {x} with the path to your domain ID map. Use ONE of the two following commands as both give the same result. Do not run both.
# net idmap restore {x} OR # net idmap restore /var/lib/samba/winbindd_idmap.tdb < {x}
After running those commands, run
# net cache flush
Now doing all this may still involve a fair bit of work, so it's debatable as to whether it would be simpler to redo the config.
As for the share config that would need to be done manually, I think.
OS6 is a revolutionary change with a radically different OS. The web interface has a similar layout, but under the hood things are quite different. This is the kind of change that would be very rare.
Whilst you can convert an EXT4 filesystem to BTRFS this is not recommended and not something we support doing, nor does the competition. So we decided this was as good an opportunity as any to make some big changes that would make the OS easier to maintain going forward, providing a benefit for both us and our users, to make a clean start with new products running ReadyNAS OS 6.
Our latest products e.g. the 3138 released at the end of last year run OS6. I would expect this to be the case for new products too for quite some time yet. Migrating from an OS6 box to another OS6 box is straightforward, like migrating from an OS4 box to another OS4 box (with the same CPU architecture) is straightforward.
Thanks for the reply, I'll keep it in mind for the next OS4 to OS6 migration that comes up 😕
Already spent 11 hours recreating everything last night (that time includes the 3x factory resets required after screwing up the 516 trying to import elements of the OS4 config before I discovered that is not possible in any way) and kicking off the rsync jobs to pull all of the old data between the boxes.
Sandsharks submission to the Ideas area is a good one. This is going to be more an more a problem as the OS4 boxes hit (or exceed) end of life and the users are faced with manually entering everything an OS6 device or changing NAS vendors. I know OS6 can be run on some legacy boxes but as it requires a reset and restore from backup the same issue applies 😞
Yes, your task is more daunting than mine. I only have family and friends who have access, though that does include ReadyNAS remote access, which you didn't mention, and isn't supported in OS6. In a business environment, where the task needs to be cleaner and faster, much more is needed than I even thought about.
I have migrated only the machines used for backup -- the ones that have no users other than admin and myself. I'm looking at migrating the rest and started to see the problems you are living -- and I held up. I'm actually migrating legacy machines to OS6 rather than to a new NAS, but the task is the same.
I frankly don't believe Netgear has anyone working or even consulting on the project who has ever worked in a small company environment where a NAS may be managed by an outside company or someone "part time", and so they do not understand that segment of their customer base. They are making decisions for home consumers -- people who care about the fancy (and completely worthless, stupid, and processor-consuming) animated fan on the "Performance" page of the admin interface instead of real performance and capability. It's sad to see what the "Jedi's" created come to this. And yet, i persist with the products (at least as long as I can keep my systems up and running with available parts and used systems and this forum remains helpful).
