Magic and Lies

So this was a nail biting exercise - over 20,000 music tracks stored and only 50% backed up. The instructions on the NetGear site promised seamless execution, so taking a deep breath I selected ‘Remote Update’ from the admin console and then decided to browse the support pages while the 500mb download took place. Big mistake - tales of woe and wipeout - the phrase ‘expensive brick’ cropping up - in short everything I didn’t want to hear.

No way to back out of the process, so cross fingers and wait - a couple of hours later, message flashes up to reboot the device. The upgrade delivered a new version of Slimserver, so several hours elapsed as it re-catalogued the collection. On completion, I looked at the playlist, surprised it had survived the upgrade and noticed that the song titles and artists were out of sync - generating a new playlist took care of that.

Both Transporter and Squeezebox then upgraded their firmware to match the new slimserver version - no human intervention required and on starting demonstrated that the old ’synch’ problem appeared to have been resolved - very impressive - I can only imagine the tales of woe on various message boards were the result of people panicking and rebooting before the process was completed. It took me about 7 hours, including the re-cataloguing of the music. Note to NetGear - some kind of progress meter or logging output would be nice…