#NetGear, #ReadyNAS, virtualisation and it's support penalties (a draft from a few months ago)

I'm writing as a technician in the US is fixing a NetGear ReadyNAS. At 2:28 in the morning.

We don't yet know what went wrong, but we do know it stopped talking to the LAN for management and the Private SAN about 21 1/2 hours ago.

I got it working again by lunchtime, but then about 90 minutes later it dropped out. Permanently it seemed, so it was time to call out the big guns.

A tech support call later had someone on the phone from Holland to help sort things out, but that introduced some fun.

As the NAS supported the infrastructure at this site, including the gateway server, and email - there was to be no email, and no remote control sessions in the normal course of events,

And, as the ADSL links are in the other building a physical link into the back of the router was not possible.

This is what I needed to have working:
-1. A tablet working and connected to the Internet without using the main LAN
0. An email account (outlook.com at the moment) through which I can send and receive emails outside the infrastructure to the support team.
1. A laptop connected to the DMZ directly (which is physical, not virtual) and able to connect to the Internet.
2. A wireless connection to the internal LAN that could attempt to talk to the management interface of the ReadyNAS.
3. A serial cable to plug into the ReadyNAS for telnet connection and direct management.
4. A USB to serial UART converter
5. The drivers for the converter!!!
6. Network cables that would reach from the laptop to the ReadyNAS, from the laptop to the DM'S Hub, and from the ReadyNAS to the DMZ hub.
7. Patience (there was a nearly 4 hour break in communications with support when they did not answer my updates or emails #fail
8. Access to http://www.readynas.com/kb/faq/boot/how_do_i_use_the_boot_menu for instructions on how to reboot the ReadyNAS into different modes (watch out for factory reset!!!)

So, would you be able to get this running in under an hour?
Do you even have a serial cable in the office now?
If you do, do you have a computer (that you can then connect to the Internet) with a serial port on it?

Thankfully I did, but I might easily not have.