I've been saddled with one of these dreaded things with a gun pointed to my head. Nothing can be worse.
In any event, if you were to unbox and connect a Netgear ReadyNAS to your corporate network, and said ReadyNAS came from the factory with OS Version 6.0.8, and said network had a firewall that didn't allow any and every HTTP request to flow through it unfettered, you would have the same odd experience I had.
You would log in with the default admin credentials, and be prompted to run through a wizard. You could cancel out of it or complete the steps - wouldn't matter. Either way, when the wizard exits, you would get a continual 'flashing' or cycling webpage. It would flash between a hint of the admin console, a box saying "Connection Lost", and the splash screen for the device. You would never be able to click on anything with any success. You could restore the OS, restore to factory defaults, and basically end up in the same death spiral.
If however you looked at said firewall to see what traffic, if any, was hitting it from the IP used by the ReadyNAS, you'd see lots of HTTP requests going to subdomains of netgear.com and readynas.com, and even the stray IPv4 address. You might try to open them one at a time a la "whack-a-mole", or you would just allow all traffic from that IP address - like I did - which works.
Thanks bags, Netgear, for again making the lives of IT professionals everywhere just a little more gruesome and unbearable.
