I’ve talked in the past about how cool it is to have a root shell on your NAS. I’d like to take a moment to second that.

Some software that copies web logs off one of our readynas 1100s wasn’t working today. I got looking and it used a domain account. I realized pretty quickly it had stopped working when we had upgraded the NAS devices to the new domain, but we don’t use this one setup often enough to have noticed it had stopped running.

I logged into the readynas and used wbinfo to verify that winbind was working right. While poking around the log files I saw and error about proftpd and PAM. I’m lucky to have to of these readynas boxes, so I verified that the pam configs hadn’t changed compared to the production system. I then checked the proftpd binary and it had changed size. Raidiator appears to be debian based, you can see woody packages in a ‘dpkg -l’. Interestingly ‘dpkg -s proftpd’ shows version ‘1.3.0-9.netgear6’ on both machines, although it had definitely changed. I copied the proftpd binary from the production nas to the backup nas and restarted proftpd and authentication started working again.

5% chance it was a fluke, but I think it’s a real bug that slipped past QA and if not for being open source based I’d be sitting in a support queue rather than having the problem fixed and blogging about it already. Forum post here too.

They’ve been adding lots of cool features to the ReadyNAS line, like a built in bittorrent client and some neat photo support. It already supports CIFS and things like rsync, making it pretty accessible and functional out of the box. Besides what looks like decent support for third party development. That there’s a real usable website separate from the netgear main site points to there being some decent smart people behind the project, and possibly at Netgear for letting their acquisition do some things the right way.

Despite the RND4000 (4 Disk desktop model without disks) being about $800, I want one just to hack on raidiator. Too bad it’s not a fully open source distro.