NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hi,

I thought I would share my experience with installing NASLite+. It was a little tougher than I thought it would be, but it's a very cool product.

I had two old computers that I figured I would try, as I had an extra 80gig hard disk lying around. This is just for my home use, and I figured having the harddisk in another computer would be a safe place to keep online backups of documents + photos and the like.

First step: Get the software. I did the paypal thing, updated my credit card info as I don't use it often and the expiration date was passed. Then wait for the e-mail from serverelements. After about 4 hours, I got nervous and sent an e-mail. Ralph quickly replied with the e-mail that was sent. My hotmail account apparently classified their original e-mail as spam, so I didn't notice it. I should have checked this.

Then, I downloaded the .iso image, and tried a myriad of approaches to burn it. Eventually I discovered a nice freeware package which will do just that on XP: http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/beta.htm You download that, install it, and then right click on the .iso file to burn a CD. Seems like it may require SP2...

Second step: get computer to boot NASLite. I'm not sure why, but the computer I'm using gets confused if I disable all the hard disks as per the NASLite+ manual's suggestion. It also seemed happier after I tried to boot an XP cd, and now it's just absolutely fine with the NASLite+ CD. The computer is an Aptiva P266 with 96mg. I have only two hard disks in it, the original 3 gig plus another (newer) 80gig. The silly powersupply ony has three power outputs, so I didn't bother with another smaller drive.

Third step: configure the hard disks. I was originally a bit confused by the message that the drives were "unsuccessful" I read the manual and just formatted them with a capital C (must be capital, lower case is just ignored) to check them for errors. After quite a while, the drives were nicely formatted and NASLite+ seems almost ready to rock and roll.

Fourth step: The network. This is mentioned early in the manual, but I skipped over the failure as I figured I could try another NIC. This turned out to be foolish thinking. I had three old 10meg NICs lying around, and I tried each of these. NASLite+ doesn't recognise any of them. Complains about no /dev/eth0 or /dev/eth1. One card was a no-name, but the other was 3COM Level III.

I also tried my old Gateway P-150 with 24 meg ram. I couldn't get it to boot from a CDRom, so that was a no go. As the computer isn't at all as powerful, I figured I'd go back to focusing on the Aptiva.

That's where I am now. I'm thinking that it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to use such a slow card anyway. Even if it's for home use, I may not need Gigabyte transfers, but there's no reason to make things so very slow. So, I'm thinking of getting a NetGear FA310TX 10/100 PCI NIC RJ-45 or perhaps a no-name from compusa: TE100-PCIWN 32-bit PCI 10/100Mbps N-way Fast Ethernet Card.

Well, that's the status. Any advice is very welcomed.

As for the product, a bit of effort to make the installation more friendly for XP users could help. Also, I would think a product which would install onto the hard disk and boot from it would make a lot more sense. I would think in general folks would rather dedicate a hard disk to the OS and then you could eliminate the CD-Rom and the floppy. While I understand the idea to allow swappable drives with other versions of NASLite, I would think a lot of folks just want to make use of their old computer like I do, and have a central place to share files. A print server would be cool too!


Thanks again for making the product. It's a great idea.

- Tom

you are right about the gigabit speeds. With the computer you are running them on you would not get that great of speeds and I also believe the OS does not support that many gigabit card right now.

I am not sure how well it supports 10/100 cards, but I tried it using 3 different cards and they all worked.

DO you know if the 10 mbit card you have are working like in windows or a normal linux distrobution?

Sorry I can not help much but I am fairly new to the software as well, luckily it all worked fairly easily with my hardware.

Hi,

Thanks for the help animatt.

All three cards I tried were 16 bit PCI cards, perhaps the driver only supports 32 bit ones.

I ordered the one below from compusa, put it in and NASLite+ is now very happy.

I've backed up all the appropriate files from my laptop and desktop, and couldn't really be happier with it.

I'm looking forward to new and improved things from you Server Elements guys. Keep up the good work.

Final suggestions for improvements:
1. Have the HTTP server only serve up stuff from a public_html directory, that way I can use the one NASLite box to serve some stuff to people on the web and also back up my files. Surely that wouldn't be too difficult.

2. Again, please have a version that would boot from just a hard disk. No reason to have a floppy + CDROM.

3. Supporting a print server would be most excellent. Wouldn't need to pay up for the network capable printers.

4. More esoteric: Support GO's Digital Media server and/or DVArchive. Makes it a lot easier to serve a Replay or Media Player from files on the server.

5. Final plug: please make it a little easier for people with Windows experience to set this up. The only difficult bit really is building the CD-Rom from an ISO file. More complicated would be a Windows program which checked the hardware on a computer to see if it'd work. That's probably a bit over the top, as it's not too hard just to try it. But it could prompt people thinking about getting the software.

Regards,
Tom

You can do this now - run DVArchive from another box and point to the NASLite+ drive for storage. I have NAS running 400GB of storage for my DVArchive. Works perfectly, and streams back to the ReplayTV with no hiccups.

Hi,

Yes, I could imagine I could store the media on the NASLite+ drive and serve it from another PC. But I would really like to run the server on the same computer as NASLite+. Mostly just so I can have one computer on all the time.