Installing Ubuntu 14.04 server on a Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra Duo v2

About

This blog post talks about installing Ubuntu 14.04 server on my Netgear ReadyNAS.

Intro

Many, many moons ago I bought myself a Netgear ReadyNAS – a small 2 bay unit for not much money and at first I was very happy with it. But I’m a nerd! So naturally over time I want to play with things and get more out of the unit than the manufacturer wanted to give me.

What it can do

It really helped to install the root extension and be able ssh into the unit. That meant I could install dnsmasq and define some hosts in /etc/ethers and /etc/hosts so dhcp and DNS was sorted. I also installed transmission which made the unit that little bit more useful.

What it can’t do

I was always hoping for an easy way to install OpenVPN on it – after all, my unit is an x86 box running Linux; how hard can it be?! Turns out it ain’t easy – not that I tried 🙂 I read up on it and gave up before starting. So that bugged me. Friends around me started buying things like the HP ProLiant N54L MicroServer which hangs in the same price range but totally wins in every category when compared to my ReadyNAS.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I moved into my new house. I now share the house with non-nerds who probably should be on a separate network to me. Also, it’s always bugged me that the WiFi is bridged into my home network – so just for some added security and safety I was going to separate the house into 2 networks using the 2x1GigE nics in the NAS, only to learn that the unit can’t do NAT! There is no support for it in the kernel and I was surely not going to compile a kernel on this unit without the ability to fix things that may break.

The solution

After a bit of reading on the web I found out that you can use a serial console port on the back of the unit to get a KVM connection, so you can get a keyboard and a screen connected. You can then also boot from a USB drive and install your operating system of choice. I had previously played with FreeNAS and I do think the filesystems are better in BSD-landi but my BSD experience is non-existent and so I opted for Ubuntu server.

Ideas started to form

With the possibility of installing Ubuntu on the ReadyNAS so many things seemed suddenly possible.

• Format everything using btrfs and use it’s built-in RAID1 feature.
• Run an OwnCloud server.
• Like so many others I’m affected by a buggy out of the box modem/router which can’t do port forwarding – this can go in bridge mode and the NAS can do this.
• Separate my home network into “WiFi and others” and “privileged” 🙂
• Install an ntpd, transmission, OpenVPN
• …

How?

The serial connection

Buy the hardware

Buy yourself a little serial to USB adapter if you haven’t got one already. I didn’t and opted for the naked version (pl2303HX) which cost me just AU$6.20 including shipping! (I bought mine from top_electronics_au on ebay but am not affiliated with them in any way).

Connect the hardware

On my unit the serial port was covered by a sticker – peel that off and connect your serial adapter to the pins underneath this.

Note that you will have to connect the RX/TX lines crossed. From right to left, you’ll have +5V, then TX, RX and Ground. My serial to USB adapter mentions 3.3V and since all components are powered in some way I didn’t hook 5V and ground up – only RX/TX (crossed).

Set up the software

I was able to get minicom to work using 9600 baud and 8N1 on /dev/ttyUSB0, YMMV. After plugging in the USB to serial adapter, have a look at `dmesg | tail` to see what device has been assigned to it. Then run `minicom -c on -s` to enter setup mode and configure your connection. Exit setup mode and hit return a few times, your screen should update.

Word of warning: like with any serial connection it has issues when you hammer it – so don’t hold the backspace key and wait for your line to be deleted. You’ll have to feed in one after the other key stroke.

Back things up

Ever since I bricked a Samsung Galaxy SIII in a similar operation and didn’t have a backup I can’t stress enough how important it is that you back things up! I ran the following commands first when ssh’d into the NAS:

log_command() { echo $* >> NAS_log.txt; $* >> NAS_log.txt; }
log_command mount
log_command cat /etc/fstab
for i in /dev/md?; do log_command mdadm --detail $i; done
log_command pvdisplay
log_command vgdisplay
log_command lvdisplay
do log_command sgdisk -p /dev/sd? ; done

This will define a new command “log_command” which simply puts all arguments into a text file and then executes the arguments and puts the output in the same text file. This comes in really handy in case you’d like to restore.

Boot from the thumb drive

Now that we’re a bit more familiar with the NAS let’s boot of a USB thumb drive. The NAS won’t boot of a USB CD-ROM btw.

Create the thumb drive

I used UNetbootin to create my thumb drive.

1. Plug in the USB and let it auto-mount
2. Start UNetbootin as root
3. Select which Ubuntu ISO you’d like to flash on the thumb drive

This gives you a fairly standard bootable USB key but we do want the console output redirected to our serial console cable and have to set up syslinux for it first.

Redirect output to the serial console

Edit the syslinux.cfg on the root of the USB key and add the following 2 lines as the first lines:

SERIAL 0
CONSOLE 0

“SERIAL 0” tells syslinux to print the output to the first serial console (0) and needs to be the first line. The second line stops syslinux from printing anything to the standard console. With those 2 lines you will get a boot menu over the serial console. The next step is to change the boot entries to also redirect output to the serial console.

This is the stanza UNetbootin creates for the “Default” entry:

label unetbootindefault
menu label Default
kernel /ubnkern
append initrd=/ubninit vga=788 -- quiet

Change the last line to:

append initrd=/ubninit console=ttyS0,9600n8

Removing “quiet” will give you the output that’s otherwise suppressed and replacing vga=788 with console=ttyS0,9600n8 again tells syslinux which serial port and other connection parameters to use.
I went through and did that for all stanzas so I could easily boot into the rescue image or the memtest.

Boot the NAS of the thumb drive

Plug the prepared USB drive into any of the USB ports and hold down the “backup” button at the front of the unit as you power it on.
In minicom immediately start hitting the ESC key until you see the below screen:

Hit return for the boot menu or [tab] for all entries in plain text. After you’ve hit return you should see this screen:

Boot into Rescue mode

I opted to first boot into rescue mode and take a backup of all partitions. When booted from the USB key in rescue mode I found the following partitions:

• /dev/sda1 (vfat) 126MB bootable partition
• /dev/sdb1 my USB I booted from
• /dev/sdc & /dev/sdd == The 2 bays
• /dev/md125 == 2TB (c VG)
• /dev/md126 == 0.5GB (swap)
• /dev/md127 == 4GB (root)

/dev/sda1 is the bootable partition the NAS starts from but it’s inaccessible when booted normally.

Back things up

In case something went horribly wrong I wanted to be able to restore the partitions as they currently are. I didn’t have to restore anything so this is untested but dd’ing the partitions away seemed reasonable.

mount /dev/c/c /mnt/ # mount your ReadyNAS RAID volume group
dd if=/dev/md127 of=/mnt/root.fs.dev.md127.dd # copy the root partition onto the RAID volume
ls -l /mnt/root.fs.dev.md127.dd # check that the size matches roughly
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     4293906432 Mar 31 01:15 /mnt/root.fs.dev.md127.dd
mkdir /mnt/test # create a new mount-point
mount /mnt/root.fs.dev.md127.dd /mnt/test/ # mount your copy
ls /mnt/test/ # compare things look as expected
umount /mnt/test/
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/boot.fs.dev.sda1.dd # rinse and repeat for the boot partition
mount /mnt/boot.fs.dev.sda1.dd /mnt/test/ # mount your copy
ls /mnt/test/ # compare things look as expected
umount /mnt/test/

I then rebooted and saved the two dd files along with all my other data on a separate drive.

Install Ubuntu

This is the boring step now – as described above, boot from the USB thumb drive and select “Default” in the boot menu.

I had trouble with the installation process due to a faulty USB thumb drive but once I swapped it the installation was a breeze.

Make sure you use /dev/sda1 as the /boot partition and that you install the boot loader on /dev/sda. The installer does that automatically once you select /dev/sda1 as /boot.

Filesystems

I felt pretty adventurous and decided to go for btrfs!

Since I don’t know how to choose btrfs’ built in raid1 capabilities from the installer I opted for the above partition layout and a life rebuild post installation.

Building a raid1

First I had to create another partition on the hard disk that’s not in use. The simplest way seemed:

cgdisk /dev/sdb
# Make sure your partition tables are identical:
sgdisk -p /dev/sda
sgdisk -p /dev/sdb

Then create the new btrfs filesystem and add it to the exisitng one to convert it to a raid1:

mkfs.btrfs /dev/sdb1
btrfs device add /dev/sdb1 / 
btrfs balance start -dconvert=raid1 -mconvert=raid1 /

This worked although there is something weird going on. For some reason the reported filesystem capacity and disk usage doesn’t match up. “df” shows a total capacity of 3.7TB with 3.4TB in use. While “du” shows 1.7TB total usage on my 2TB raid1.

# df -h / /home
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1       3.7T  3.4T  258G  94% /
/dev/sdb1       3.7T  3.4T  258G  94% /home

# du -hsc /
1.7T    /
1.7T    total

# btrfs device scan
Scanning for Btrfs filesystems
btrfs filesystem show
Label: none  uuid: c5d5a3ed-2b45-4340-8e38-a107fde8df2b
        Total devices 2 FS bytes used 1.69TiB
        devid    1 size 1.82TiB used 1.69TiB path /dev/sda1
        devid    2 size 1.82TiB used 1.69TiB path /dev/sdb1

I tried an online re-balance of the raid but that didn’t work:

# btrfs filesystem balance status -v /
No balance found on '/'
# btrfs filesystem balance start -v /
Dumping filters: flags 0x7, state 0x0, force is off
  DATA (flags 0x0): balancing
  METADATA (flags 0x0): balancing
  SYSTEM (flags 0x0): balancing
 Done, had to relocate 1736 out of 1736 chunks

If I do get to the bottom of it I’ll report it here.

Edit: So you’ve had your first blackout

I thought I’d add these steps here because after my first blackout the NAS wouldn’t boot at all. It was waiting patiently for me to make a choice between “Ubuntu” and “Advanced options”.

The following lines make Grub2 select the right entries by default and also print the kernel output to the serial console for potential debugging. Edit /etc/default/grub

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=2
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="console=tty0 console=ttyS0,9600n8"
GRUB_TERMINAL=serial
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --unit=0 --speed=9600 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"

Then, don’t forget to run

sudo update-grub2

for the new settings to take effect.

Result

I am more than happy that I did this and was able to share the experience here! If you’ve got a ReadyNAS and are sitting on the fence, I highly recommended this to satisfy your inner nerd! 🙂

Things I googled that were helpful

• ReadyNasDUO-200 customisation guide
• Installing Ubuntu on a netgear ReadyNas Ultra
• SYSLINUX Wiki
• Using Btrfs with Multiple Devices – btrfs Wiki