NAS Data sharing and Development
NAS Storage devices and links come at reasonable prices nowadays. A pretty solution, when you don’t
want to open holes on your MAC and enable smb/cifs file sharing in prefs sharing.
When you don’t want to shelve out too much money for a decent Fileserver, you can take advantage
of either a Storage Link, like the Linksys NSLU2 NAS or a more premade solution, like the Buffalo Teratech Pro
Another Solution, If one would have time is to build a NAS Server from an X-Box, if you are technically so inclined.
However, I tried the first option mentioned and found, that in it’s default State the Devices are pretty useless.
The first thing, that you want to do is to upgrade the firmware to a recent version, which can be either a Linksys Firmware or third Party Firmware.
The latest Firmware upgrade from Lynksys
(Note: This is not really the last one, there is a newer one, which I lost the Download link for).
Some documentation about partitions, and file systems
By default any USB disk that you hook up on the NSLU2 must be formated from the Admin Panel prior setting up the Shares and all the rest.
The default the File Format used is an ext3 Linux journaled file format, which means, you can not really access your disks outside the smb/cifs Protocoll that the NSLU2 uses.
The Linksys Administration administration backend is pretty sluggish, and I spend I big Deal of Time to get accustomed to all the options and settings.
Upgrading the Firmware in a correct manner requires a special Tool available from Linksys and setting the Device in Ugrade mode, without any disks attached and the only documentation available is only available from the NSLU2 LINUX WIKI,
or some NSLU2 forums.
However, I managed to set it up correctly, with currently three USB WDMyBook on two devices.
One device has the third party UNSLUNg Firmware and the other one the latest unofficial Firmware, which is hard to find.
Furthermore, it is possible to extend the Functionality of those devices by unslinging the NSLU2, which I haven’t attemted yet,
and installing additional packages on to one of the external hard disks.
The Major problem that I face, is that the implementation of Samba with all default versions of Samba is at version 2,
and it is also not possible to finegrade the permissions on the Shares, so you can do local development on them.
Placing Site Folders on those Shares has basically two side effects.
Invisible .DS_Store files are spreading everywhere, and error messages due to the fact, that I can not set any permissions above 700.
However, it is still a valuable solution all in all for scheduled backups at predifined time intervals and a relatively safe File sharing
in a multi OS network.
Posted ·2006-09-10 · by · marios ·
© 2006-2008 marios buttner
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