New NAS

Although it seems not so very long ago that I purchased our ReadyNAS NV+ with 2.6 Tb of usable disc space (4 Tb before Netgear’s proprietary X-RAID is applied to the disc array), it’s been hovering around the 80% consumed mark for some time now. I thought it would take a few more years to fill it, but with MythTV, an active digital camera and CDs being regularly ripped to the network, it soon mounts up.

The time had therefore come to do something about the problem, before it became more pressing.

I considered replacing the current discs with 2 Tb models for a doubling of the capacity, but that would still leave me with another problem: the NV+ has quite a slow CPU and this is now especially noticeable on my new desktop, which retrieves my home directory over NFS from the NV+. So, I wanted better performance in addition to more space.

A few years ago, Netgear had few serious competitors in the home and small business NAS market. That’s changed now, though, so I had a few other options to check out in addition to Netgear’s own latest offerings.

Ultimately, though, I decided to stick with the familiar, well-built boxes manufactured by Netgear. This time, though, I opted for the higher-end ReadyNAS Pro, which Netgear had conveniently just released in a 12 Tb format (only 9.1 Tb of which is usable, however), the RNDP6620.

I’m told that I’m the first customer in the Netherlands to purchase this model and I certainly had to put up with a couple of promised delivery dates slipping before the box finally arrived a few days ago. Actually, there was a delivery attempt just before Christmas, but we had already left for the US.

Anyway, the package finally arrived on Wednesday and I wasted little time in unpacking it and examining the contents.

The chassis contains 6 x Western Digital WD2002FYPS drives, good for a theoretical 12 Tb, which, as I’ve mentioned, is actually 9.1 Tb usable after X-RAID2 has been applied.

Netgear Nederland had told me on the phone that this model was to be sold with ES series Seagate drives, but the reality is Western Digital. Subtract one point for supplying incorrect product information.

After unpacking the unit, I removed the left side panel to reveal the memory slots. Neither the on-line manual or the FAQ described how to do this, so I first removed the right-hand side panel. When the memory slots weren’t to be found there, the panel on the opposite side was pretty much the only place they could be.

The system is supplied with 1 Gb RAM on a single stick of DDR2, but it will definitely benefit from more, so it’s strange that Netgear don’t explain how to perform the upgrade. That second slot wasn’t put there for nothing. It’s easy enough to find, but I still score a minus for Netgear for omitting this from the documentation.

I replaced The Unigen module with 4 Gb of DDR2 from Kingston. Netgear don’t actually list any 2 Gb sticks on their hardware compatibility list, but the ReadyNAS forums have plenty of postings from people who have successfully used this model, so I felt confident in placing the order. It should really help out with large rsync transfers.

There’s a recessed button on the back of the ReadyNAS, which can be used to access rarely used, sub-OS functionality, such as the factory reset. It also provides access to the memory test, so, after replacing the side panel, I turned the unit on, prodded the button with an unfolded paper-clip and ran the test. Happily, the new memory passed with no problems.

After booting the box for the first time, the first thing I did was upgrade the firmware, called RAIDiator, to 4.2.8, the latest version.

A reboot later, I was able to start exploring the updated Web-based UI, FrontView. That this box has a much faster CPU than the older NV+ became immediately apparent, just from the speed at which Frontiew worked in my browser. It positively zips along. The NV+ had a 280 Mhz SPARC-compatible CPU, but this box has an Intel Pentium Dual Core E2160 running at 1.8 Ghz.

This box has a few other features that the NV+ doesn’t have; dual gigabit Ethernet interfaces, for example. Both my HP ProCurve 2848 switch and the ReadyNAS Pro support 802.3ad LACP, so I’ve bonded these interfaces for a single 2 Gbit connection to my network. That should ensure that network I/O is never the bottleneck.

When I configured the networking, the box somehow got itself into a weird state, with networking statically configured as desired, but DHCP still operational in some form or other. A reboot failed to remedy the situation.

This had the effect of taking down DNS on the box, which made NTP and e-mail alerts silently fail. Because the box could thought that DHCP was operational, FrontView annoying greyed out the

field that would have enabled me to manually add a DNS server.

Netgear scores a fairly big minus for this, because I had to install the EnableRootSSH patch in order to fix the problem. An average user would have needed to contact Netgear at this point.

In the past, I’ve used the ability to ssh into the box as root to add missing functionality. For example, I was able to add support for arbitrary rsync options by hacking /frontview/bin/backup.

I washoping to do the same on the new box, too, but the file in question is now compiled Perl bytecode in this version of the firmware. That’s a pisser, because I’m now at the mercy of Netgear to supply all of the functionality I need, a point on which they’ve obviously been remiss in the past.

Maybe there’s a Perl bytecode to source decompiler out there, but at that point, it’s more effort than I want to make for something that’s essentially supposed to be a black-box appliance.

On the other hand, this version of the firmware is newer than that available for the NV+, and it just so happens that this version does now offer a field on the rsync back-up page that enables the user to specify directories to –exclude, so Netgear gains a point back here for listening to user feedback (albeit slowly).

Another interesting thing to note here is that backup is the only Perl program in the /frontview/bin directory that has been obfuscated in this way, which makes me wonder why they bothered. I can’t believe that it’s a performance enhancement.

I already had NUT running on a Linux box, which allows me to fool the ReadyNAS into believing there’s another ReadyNAS on the network that is physically connected to a UPS. This has allowed me to have my NV+ monitor my APC Smart-UPS RT 5000 XL over IP, because you otherwise have to have a UPS that can be connected over USB. This is a major shortcoming of the UPS monitoring and something Netgear evidently isn’t in a hurry to fix.

The same strategy works for the Pro, of course, so it, too, is now monitoring the UPS over IP.

Incidentally, the RT 5000 XL is now 22% loaded, which finally lights the first of five load status LEDs on the front and brings my off-line run-time capacity down to 51 minutes, should I ever need it.

In a quirk of fate, when I was situating the new ReadyNAS box, I accidentally nudged the power cord of my main Linux server, causing it to physically detach from the UPS.

This box had been giving me SMART errors about bad sectors for approximately a year, plus warnings about strange NMIs (non-maskable interrupts) from time to time. The sudden loss of electricity was more than this old timer could handle and it subsequently spewed ATA errors

on boot.

An attempt to reinstall Linux on either of its two discs failed at the mke2fs stage, so I had to retire it, spending the rest of the evening installing Fedora 12 on my very recently replaced desktop machine, which has now been pressganged into service as my new server. It looks as if I replaced my desktop just in time!

I’m now busy moving back-up jobs from the NV+ to the Pro. /home has already been moved across and is now much more responsive.

Incidentally, Netgear supplied the box with a single Cat5 cable, too cheap to include two Cat5e cables for its dual Ethernet. The Pro is supposed to be a small business machine, for crying out loud! Even the old NV+, a home user device, came with a Cat5e cable. Lose another point, Netgear.

The NV+ will remain in service for the time being as storage for our audio and video files, as accessed by our Sonos system and MythTV.

It’s hard to believe that our humble home network has now passed the 10 Tb of on-line storage mark. It’s even harder to believe that that will one day be used up, but I know from experience that it’s an absolute certainty.