NETGEAR ReadyNAS

RAIDiator 4.00b2-p2-T1 Release Notes

RAIDiator 4.00b2-p2-T1 is our first public beta for our new RAIDiator 4 firmware for the ReadyNAS. This beta release will work with any of the past and present ReadyNAS systems.

If you've been following our beta forum, RAIDiator 4 beta has taken a little longer than we had anticipated. We do apologize for the delay and we appreciate all those that have publicly backed us in our effort to bring out a quality beta. For those who will be trying the beta, we do appreciate any feedback you have with the release.

Now for the warnings. Please read before continuing.

1. Use of this beta is strictly at your own risk. Keep regular backups, especially of your irreplaceable data. NETGEAR bears no responsibility for lost data due to this or any beta release.
2. We strongly advise that you not use this beta in a production environment.
3. FrontView has been re-engineered pretty much from the ground up, so there will be some occasional rough spots.
4. Once you upgrade to this beta release, you will not be able to revert back to 3.01 due to changes in filesystem, LVM, and RAID configuration formats.
5. NETGEAR Support will in no way provide support for beta releases. All support will come from this beta forum. The Jedi council will try our best to support you here, but please understand that even if have encountered legitimate bugs, bug fixes may not occur in a timely manner, and in some cases if at all.


CHANGES SINCE 3.01
1. RAIDiator 4 is now based on Linux 2.6.
2. FrontView admin password is now “netgear1” if you do a factory default installation.
3. Remote SSH for Support is disabled by default. If you wish to enable SSH access for Support, you’ll need to install the ToggleSSH add-on.
4. Root SSH support. With the EnableRootSSH add-on, you can now remote login to the ReadyNAS RAIDiator shell as a root user. Initial password for root will be the same as the current FrontView admin password. Please keep in mind that NETGEAR may deny support if you’ve enabled root access.
5. 2TB+ volume size support. With this release, you can now fully utilize full capacity of 750GB and 1TB disk drives. Existing X-RAID systems utilizing 750GB will not automatically expand – you will need to use an add-on ForceExpansion to reclaim the extra 40GB of space beyond the previous pre-RAIDiator 4.0 2TB limitation.
6. NFS over TCP is now supported.
7. Home shares are now accessible over NFS. Keep in mind that user home shares are created on first access via CIFS.
8. Root of volumes can now be accessed by the admin user for easier volume-wide backups.
9. Network UPS. You can now specify the ReadyNAS as a network UPS server for other ReadyNAS systems so that battery-low graceful shutdown can occur with multiple ReadyNAS systems sharing the same UPS. Designate one ReadyNAS as the UPS server in the System/Power Management tab and specify others to utilize this ReadyNAS for power failure signal.
10. You can now specify the UPS battery level shutdown threshold.
11. Online X-RAID volume expansion. There’s no longer a need to reboot the ReadyNAS when adding new drives to expand the volume capacity. Volume expansion will kick off after drive initialization and you will see the capacity grow dynamically as the volume is expanded. This is useful in environments where down-time must be avoided. Requirement for online expansion – must have factory defaulted with RAIDiator 4, journaling enabled, and must not have active snapshot.
12. Better USB storage device compatibility support, including capability to handle concurrent identical devices with the same serial number.
13. NTFS read/write support to USB disks. This will allow you to easily share your Windows USB disks by plugging it into the ReadyNAS.
14. The ReadyNAS can now join into a Windows domain using a login with domain joining rights; there’s no longer a need to have domain administrator privilege.
15. The ReadyNAS can now be limited to a single Organizational Unit (OU) in a ADS environment. This allows the ReadyNAS to work more efficiently in larger domain environments.
16. HP OfficeJet network scanning now supported.
17. FrontView response has been improved.
18. Embedded UPnP AV service now supports streaming to Xbox360 and PS3, virtual folders, and audio metadata.


LIMITATIONS
1. Printing over CIFS is currently not working. If you want need printing capability, configure for IPP printing.
2. Domain user listing in FrontView is slow, especially in a large domain environment. We advise that you not use this beta in a domain environment.
3. Disk spin-down can cause disks to go offline. Disable disk spin-down if you will be using this beta.


DOWNLOAD INSTRUCTIONS
Download RAIDiator-4.00b2-p2-T1 and perform a local update from the FrontView/Update/Local tab.


Updated Thu Aug 9 08:29:09 PDT 2007

derek puts on his guinea pig hat and loads it up...

with root access available now to users, i cant wait to see what people do with the system. one of my first mods will most likely be a 'files open/in use' status page.

using smbstatus and the likes to show what clients are accessing which files. yum.

probably also going to compile distcc for it, so i can use the power of other systems on the lan to do gcc work for it. (openssl is taking too long to compile heh)

The ones that are doing the upgrades..please visit RAIDiator 4: the "I've done the upgrade" thread and post some encouraging words...

Congratulations!

No changes to backup? I'm thinking a mechanism to snapshot the entire volume, perform incremental backups, then release the snapshot.

If my primary NAS hadn't failed I'd be trying it now

Any comments from Infrant on changes to the ethernet driver or general ReadyNAS performance increases/decreases with 4.0?

-brendan

the frontview interface is ugly as sin and still has the retarded menu system, hope that changes. update went smoothly so far.

speed looks good. ReadyNAS 1GB RAM, AFP, Mac OS X, gigabit, using menu meter numbers, 38-41MB/s on 1GB file transfer. This is about the same as I've seen in 3.x

In addition, any changes to the handling of marginal or failing drives?

-brendan

Is Firefly the default itunes server??

Root of volume is now accessible -- see



admin user now has access to share c, d, ... but we haven't quite done the c-snap, d-snap, ... yet.

Still in the works with this one. Hopefully before final.

We see pretty decent performance on both XP and Vista. With the prior release, we saw a 12% increase when using 1GB RAM. This release gives a much bigger boost going to 1GB.

Also, NFS over TCP supports larger r/w blocksize, so going up to 128K or 256K blocksize will give better large-block transfer speeds.

Yes, it is.

add-on not available yet or typo?

I upgraded to 4.0beta but the main reason (in my case) is to regain that little extra space on my 750s.

thanks for releasing the beta!

im attempting to do the upgrade to the beta, and it said to reboot to start the update process... i set the readynas to reboot and the LCD screen is hung on
"Rebooting...
UPS disconnected"

and the blue power LED is blinking steadily, but i dont hear any HD activity

should i power off and back on, it has sat here for about 30 minutes now