NASLite Network Attached Storage

I have bought, built, loaded, licensed, and unlocked my NAS-Lite 2 CDD. I have formatted and mounted two drives. My other 2 aren't showing for some reason, but I'll come back to that at some point. If I go into My Network Places on my XP box, I can see the NAS-Lite machine fine. When I try to access it, I get the error message... "\\Naslite-2 is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. The network path was not found." I verified that they are both in the same workgroup. Both my computer and the NAS are on the same switch... no routers and such in between. Any idea what is going on here... this is pretty much a show stopper.

I swapped out the motherboard with another , and the same result. Ironically, this motherboard has built-in RAID support, which I configured. But, NASLite sees the 4 drives individually, not the RAID array... how is that possible? Anyways, I still can't see anything from an XP box, which is a problem.

I've seen that problem (the first post) before with Windows XP (Home and MCE) trying to retrieve data from another XP system - I believe it has it's origins in your Windows' login - specifically systems set up with a single user who is not required to enter a password when Windows starts.

The second post - where the RAID array shows up as individual drives - this is most likely caused by the integrated RAID controller not being recognized (and supported) by NASLite-2 as a RAID controller, but as a disk controller.

Without knowing the specifics, I will guess that it supports RAID levels 0, 1 & 10 only - this would indicate that it is not a true hardware RAID controller, but depends on the drivers for RAID functionality.

Thanks for the reply. My googling lead me to potential problems with Simple File Sharing, but that didn't prove out to solve anything. I got rid of the RAID configuration, after assuming that the KT7RAID wasn't going to be recongnized. I intend to buy a RAID controller, but I wanted to give this a shot for giggles. I was also going to go to this motherboard also, as its older and slowre than the one I was starting out with.

Anyways, it just started working after I was about one more attempt away from going back to FreeNAS or Ubuntu for now. I had rebooted about 20 times to no avail... always the same result. My machines have XP Pro on them, and I tried from several without luck. I tried with and without Simple File Sharing on. Nothing worked. Then after I relocated the machine to a better spot I decided to reboot the machine. I didn't have a monitor, and just hit the power button. Go figure. I thought when I did that before it did a shutdown on the power button. This time it just immediately powered off. The reboot took a long time as it checked all the disks. When it was done, I was able to see the shares on XP. Odd. I'm not sure whether to be happy, sad, or annoyed. How do I know this isn't going to just "not work" again on me when I need it to work.

I'll let it run and see what happens. I need to get a RAID controller so I can get my drives combined. It bothers me that this problem just went away for no apparant reason.

Like fordem pointed out, the problem is the windows machines and not naslite. Windows caches things, so if you had naslite with a given workgroup settings and then changed them or the IP, then you'll see that problem and it will be consistent on all xp boxes on your workgroup.

I think you made the right choice when you got naslite, now you need to run it for a while and learn to trust it. It's a good os and does what's expected of it. Most problems are hardware related and are rarely caused by naslite itself. I'm sure others here will confirm that last statement.

Hope that helps with your initial jitters

Well, I understand your point, but I don't think that is what happened. I didn't change the IP address after the initial configuration. I have other NAS boxes on my LAN and have done many different combinations of shares between various different boxes in my network of XP boxes. I've never seen this problem before. I rebuilt the NASLite box with two different motherboards 3 different times through this installation. I reconfigured it about 10 times... but never changed the IP. I am sure something in there I did wrong, but who knows what it was. Bottom line is its working now so lets hope that continues. Its seems to be pretty fast and for what I want to use it for, it fits the bill perfectly.