The ongoing Netgear saga.

Some time ago I acquired a Netgear ReadyNAS 2100 network attached storage unit. I had long since updated the firmware to the ReadyNAS OS 6.10 version by using this Github repo as the existing OS on it was extremely outdated and not worth running on a network (well it can, just not securely). But poking around the ReadyNAS I noticed the OS in it seems to be just a bog standard Debian release. So after a little bit of messing around with the thing and a few hours later I had successfully upgraded it from Debian 8 "Jessie" to Debian 12 "Bookworm", however this broke a few things like the Web GUI that ran on apache2. Unfortunatley after one major uh oh by editing a file that I should've probably left alone I ended up making this thing unbootable... until I removed the HDD

It turns out the main OS for this thing is stored on a 1Gbit SK Hyinx NAND Flash chip. This chip (as of the writing of this post) is hidden in the OS but after viewing the HDD on a regular Linux machine it appears folders like /boot /sys and so on are stored on the NAND with the HDD acting as a OverlayFS ontop of the NAND. Meaning whatever you do on this machine in the Linux installation, you can easily backpedal to factory settings by just removing the hard drive containing the OverlayFS.

I'm going to keep poking around at this thing to see if I can turn it into the worlds silliest Linux server. Or maybe I can put something like TrueNAS Scale on it to keep it even more up to date. Who knows!

Until then, I hope I don't brick this thing