I have recently upgraded an Ultra 2 Plus to 6.5.0 beta (currently RC2) and had spectacularly good results, should have done this a long time ago. I just wanted to give a report of what is working well, a couple things that aren't working well, and a few things that i had to manually tweak that probably should have been setup differently in the firmware on initial install.
The Good
The following things are running so well I can hardly believe it, way better then OS4! In general I will say that my NAS definitely feels snappier and more responsive and it feels like the CPU is spinning less, yet doing more stuff. I will atttribute some of this to the new filesystem. unix find command, for example, is blinding fast. ncdu can size up the disk usage on my entire filesystem, with details at every level, within just a few seconds. The other thing I am really loving is that I can install many things using common debian wheezy installers and knock-on-wood, haven't had any problems yet, and I've installed quite a lot of stuff already that all seems to work no problem. In short, the machine is much easier to setup with new features, the addon system is easier to understand, it seems to be more efficient, and it has a more up to date version of debian, generally making it easier to get a reasonably up to date version of various linux tools, or build the latest source. The following are what I currently have installed and running with pleasing results:
Bonded ethernet
SMB and AFP file sharing (some problems, see below)
Rsync
SSH access
Various addons from netgear's site(htop, php, pydio, monstaftp, linux-dash, python, qbittorrent, sabnzbd, shellinabox, sickbeard, SMBPlus)
Crashplan 4.6.0 in headless operation
Fossil SCM system, running as server
updated python to 2.7.11 and 3.x
Django and web2py
rtorrent-ps, latest version
the following linux cmd line tools are installed and functioning( tmux, screen, rtorrent, rtorrent-ps, stunnel, iperf3, colordiff, vim7.4, nload, slurm, cbm, speedometer, nethogs, bmon, gnu less, latest sqlite, fossil, latest git, manpage engine and some manpages, postgres 9.4, dialog, tree, ncdu, multitail, tcl)
leafp2p disabled via systemctl
utorrent3
A few problems
AFP has a copy and paste bug where if you try to copy and paste a file in place from an OSX client machine, error code -50 is returned Expected behavior is to duplicate the file.
Getting some strange behavior with SMB as well, when OSX client goes to sleep and comes back, the SMB share is not properly unmounted and has to be force unmounted and remounted again.
The anti-virus system that is included will not allow me to turn off live virus scanning and just use scheduled scanning. All schedueld scanning is disabled as long as live scanning is also turned off. Boo! I found it to be a bit resource hungry to leave live scanning always on. There should be a way to just scan the system once every night and leave it off the rest of the time.
Setup
a few things had to be manually tweaked after initial setup of clean firmware install, and probably should have been configured in the fresh firmware.
had to manually run a command to set the locale properly:
localedef -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8
Numerous ssh related files were hard coded with the factory hostname, rather then the one I chose when following the installation wizard:
/root/.ssh/*.pub
/etc/ssh/*
the default hostname maybe should have been changed to my desired hostname also? Maybe not, but I changed it:
I spoke a little too soon. Another problem that just came up when I updated the firmware from beta2 388 to RC2:
I had previously installed vim and less using apt-get in order to have a vi and less that is better then busybox. The RC2 update stomped over the top of the less I installed and actually left the system without any less binary available in the path..in other words...busybox was left broken, and the GNU less wasn't there anymore either. I reinstalled gnu less and it works now, but wish the firmware update wouldn't do that.
I can't actually remember how I installed vim and I have to go back and figure that out again...but updating the firmware had the same effect, after i had installed vim, the firmware update broke both the busybox vi as well as vim. I can run "busybox vi" and that works, but typing "vi" gets nothing and typing "vim" gets nothing. I have to figure out how to install vim again now. I would prefer if firmware updates did not stomp over things in such a way.
the man pages for vim and less were also effected by this...gone...
If anyone has any information about why this may have gotten broken so that I can try to install both of those two things in such a way as to not break in future firmware updates..please let me know.
was also over written by the firmware updater to factory conditions.
That's not a config file, it's a config default. If /etc/hostname doesn't exist for some reason, then it gets copied from here. There is no reason to worry about this file.
RC2 also re-enabled leafp2p that I had previously disabled.
No, leafp2p in 6.5.0 doesn't work like that. It isn't a service that gets enabled or disabled like a normal service. It is purely a dependent service, which is required by ReadyCLOUD.
I don't use ReadyCloud. I disabled the leafp2p service using helpful instructions from this forum, you can see the other thread for how I disabled the service from running.
After the udpate, its running again and had to be both stopped and disabled with systemctl as well as disabled wtih update-rc.d.
The point of my comment is that the firmware update re-enabled changes I made in either init.d or systemd (or both). the firmware update is resetting certain configuration decisions back to factory state.
with regards to /etc/ files that are getting overwritten by firmware update, can you pelase be more specific what I can do to prevent that from happening in the future when I update the firmware? How do I go about using this other directory you mentioned and is that something that will apply to all /etc/ files? Do you have a list somewhere of all configuration files that I can expect to be stomped over during a firmware update?
/etc/default/config contains the config default. This can be useful for repairing the config if needed. Everything in /etc/default/config will get overwritten every firmware update.
In the example given above /etc/default/config/etc/hostname is the default config but /etc/hostname is what is actually used.
We try to automatically repair the config where we can so if the changes you make are not reflected in the management service database they may be reverted.
Some config files are automatically overwritten on firmware updates but there is the option to use override files for some of these (e.g. for the samba config) to override the config with what you want.
I don't see anything under /etc/default/config related to apt, or init.d or leafp2p.
I see fstab there, but my version of /etc/fstab was thankfully not stomped over by the firmware update.
Here are the things which this minor firmware update destroyed in my configuration, that I have found so far:
leafp2p had been previously disabled, now it was re-enabled again
/etc/apt/sources.list was reset back to factory value
gnu less, and Vim; were rendered non-funtional, and busybox was not completely reset either, so I had no less and no vi after the firmware update, but also didn't have my gnu less or vim either.
As mentioned earlier, I had changed the value of /etc/default/config/etc/hostname to the same value I entered while first installing the fresh firmware. It sounds like this is not important, but I am just pointing it out.
I am in the process of saving my configuration changes under versoin control so that in the future when I do firmware updates I will be able to get my NAS running again, but its unfortunate that Netgear feels its neccessary to reset some of these things to factory state every time we update the firmware.
If you are not using a service that depends on leafp2p then on 6.5 it should automatically be disabled.
Each firmware has updates to the list. It has already been pointed out how you should add your own sources
Using SSH is for advanced users and there are a wide range of things you can do with it. It's not hard to install packages you've installed over the top of themselves if you need to after a firmware update.
As has already been explained it's sensible to overwrite the config defaukt each firmware update. Those files are meant to show what the default config looks like.
If you are not using a service that depends on leafp2p then on 6.5 it should automatically be disabled.
I am not running ReadyCloud on my RN202 (currently running 6.5.0-RC1) and leafp2p is runningon that system. I turned off ReadyCloud on the web ui before installing the first 6.5.0 beta release.
mdgm, with respect, this thread is not a complaint thread. Im trying to let you guys know my experience so you can do whatever you feel you would like to do to improve your product.
I agree with Stephen on the leafp2p thing...somewhere along the line when I first installed OS6, I turned on ReadyCloud briefly to see what it was about. At the time I was not able to login in order to use it, so I turned it back off in frontview. I don't need it. I have not turned it on since and have rebooted numerous times since then. However leafp2p was left running on the system. when I asked about this a few weeks ago you suggested I use systemctl to stop it, so that is what I did and it worked.
Now after firmware upgrade it is back running again. I have disabled it again using systemctl.
If it is mean to be totally automatic and managed by the frontview switch, then that mechanism is broken.
I found another file that was over written by the firmware update, with an empty file.
/etc/environment
Is there some way for me to have values in that file such that the firmware won't overwrite it on each firmware update? Or a different way to handle setting global ENV variables. I'm guessing I should use
when you say to have a look at the "image", is it fair to say that all files in the image will systematically overwrite whatever is already in my existing install? Does the firmware update do anything smart to only update files that actually need updating, or does it just systematically overwrite every file that is in the firmware image?
I am assuming you are referring to the downloadable 6.5.0 RC2 IMG file. Can you please give me a hint for what type of file this is and how I can have a look at it to see what that list of files is that will overwrite an existing system during firmware update?
Its not that big of a deal, I am in the process of making a script that will just reinstall everything I have installed which the firmware update may have stomped over, which is kind of a PITA, but not that bad, there are only a couple things I've found so far, but I'd like to get an idea of what to watch out for in the future to avoid this problem every time I update the firmware. Obviously this problem won't happen if I only use approved app addons, but how much fun is that?
Glad to hear you are going to improve the leafp2p stuff in the next update!
