Replacing the OS on a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo v1
August 21, 2020•494 words
Generic Goals
- Install Linux on the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo v1.
- Install and expose some file sharing capabilities that allow me to utillize the storage bays as I have 2 x 1 TB drives waiting to be installed.
Why
- Newer nicer hardware that would be much easier to use is more expensive -- I was given this item free of charge
- This is a learning experience. Installing a new OS on this somewhat constrained hardware will be a new experience from me.
- Recycling! Reuse what you've got instead of throwing away and buying new.
Research and Limitations
- This model features a single-core SPARC processor. I've not heard of this processor (apparently it's in the RISC family), but Debian latest doesn't current appear to build for it. The last release to build for SPARC was Debian 7 (codename "wheezy"). In fact, DistroWatch doesn't list any Linux distros as currently supporting SPARC. However, I'm okay with running an "obsolete" OS such as long as the exposure is only on the local network.
- The hardware only contains 256 MB of RAM.
Specific Goals
- Install Debian 7 "wheezy" on 2 x 1 TB drives in raid 1 using Btrfs. However, support for Btrfs was backported to "wheezy" and that concerns me. I may have to go with older technology such as LVM + ext4.
- Really reaching is to try to install Nextcloud. This system barely meets (see Duo Technical Specifications bookmark) the minimum recommended hardware specifications to run Nextcloud, but for a single user this may be okay. I'd probably opt for using SQLite as the database over MariaDB/Postgres.
- Probably more realisitic is to setup a Samba server.
Progress
Get the Debian 7 "wheezy" Installer
- The Debian organization archived "wheezy" some time ago, so in order to find the images, I had to dig into http://archive.debian.org/. The *.iso can be found here.
Halted
There are two reasons I'm halting this project. I just discovered my ethernet port on my hardware is not functional. In the stock Netgear OS, I can't get the ethernet lights to activate and using Netgear's RAIDar app, it cannot find my unit. Therefore, its not practical for me to continue with this project, but I'll leave this post for documentations sake for the next lucky sucker who thinks they can acheive this. I'm suspicious that I would have had serious issues doing this after reading Paul Whittaker's attempt to put Diet-PC on the SPARC ReadyNAS.
Resources and Similar Guides
Duo v1
- Hardware Manual of Netgear ReadyNAS Duo v1
- General Review of Netgear ReadyNAS Duo v1
- Binaries, scripts for Netgear ReadyNAS Duo v1
- Diet-PC on SPARC ReadyNAS (Duo v1)