Network Attached Storage Devices

[Crushdepth]

I need to set up a file server for the office (we just have peer network at present) and I'm thinking about using one of these Buffalo network attached storage boxes or similar. Is this a good way to go for small office of about 20 work stations? Anyone got recommendations on particular brands or models?

The file server will probably be Ubuntu/Samba.

Thanks.

[Crushdepth]

Actually, do I *need* a file server with one of these boxes, or can the box handle access rights itself ?

[Guest Reimar]

Actually, do I *need* a file server with one of these boxes, or can the box handle access rights itself ?

Maybe you take a look at HERE, could be solution as well! The cheapest alternative for an File-Server while using an "old" computer!

In the real, I don't like that LAN-Disk's because of lack of data security. Have seen several losses of whole data while using that kind of disk's within some of our customers. And for Company systems I would use as minimum a RAID 1 system which you can't with LAN-Disk's!

Cheers.

[Crushdepth]

Ok so today I got fed up with our IT guy and went down to Fortune and bought myself a D-link 323 network attached storage box for about 6,000 baht, for home use and experimentation. Basically you just shove a couple of drives in the box and plug it into the LAN. Then you use a utility to 'discover' the box and configure it. Up and running in half an hour, I had a brief play with it at work today.

The box admin panel lets you create user groups, and you can assign access rights by both group and individual. So I created a bunch of user groups matching our work groups, and created matching directories on the box, and assigned them the appropriate access rights (view, read, write etc). You need to go to each work station and map the relevant shares as network drives, which is a little fiddly, but its a one-off process.

This particular box holds 2 drives, but there are bigger ones of course. I have set it as a raid mirror. Overall, it seems like a fairly easy solution for a small office with limited IT support, although obviously you want to have redundant backups somewhere elewhere as well. One nice feature is that it enables scheduled remote backups over FTP, which will be cool for backing up our website.

On the downside, I ran into some problems initially formatting the drives - it kept hanging, and this is a widely reported problem with certain versions of the firmware for this model. While you can get through it with a bit of persistance, this sort of bug is unforgivable in such a device. But then I've never had any kind of consumer hardware box work perfectly yet

The box also has the capacity to act as an internet facing FTP server using dynamic DNS etc. This seems fairly scary to me, although I noticed some other models come with webservers and outdated versions of various CMS like Joomla, which seems positively suicidal

[stumonster]

if you wish to make a NAS from an old box and some big drives check out freeNAS

http://www.freenas.org/

[Crushdepth]

Thanks Stu, I am sorely tempted to buy some of those TB drives

I experimented with backing up my computer (250G) to the NAS box over the LAN today. The NAS is working great, but the LAN speed (100Mbs) looks like it could be a bit of a headache if we start doing centralised backups for everyone - took about 4 hours to do my machine (actual transfer speed was around 10/s). So I guess we'd have to stagger them.