Can anyone share their experience with the NAS devices?
I'm primarily focusing on the connectivity/protocol aspect here. So I would have this thing hard-wired to my router, no problem there. But I need to connect to the device afterwards. I see that this WD device in particular supports:
SMB/CIFS network filesystems
AFP ( for Apple Time Machine)
NFS (only to default Public mount)
FTP server
...the SMB/CIFS piece as best as I can tell is something that SAMBA port could interface with...something like NetDrive would probably work with this too (again, through the SAMBA plug-in I'm thinking).
If you tried this type of a setup, how have you done it?
I was looking at getting one of those things, a few years ago. The first thing that struck me was that they are relatively expensive. The next thing that struck me was that they were not all OS/2 friendly. I had no real need for fancy things like RAID, so I went looking closer to home.
I had an old Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, that had been used as a gaming machine by a nephew. He got upgraded, so I ended up with a reasonably powerful machine (single core AMD Athlon processor, with 3 GB of memory). It started with a 320 GB SATA disk drive (doesn't have the AHCI option), built in 1 GB NVIDIA network adapter, and the usual array of hardware. I also had an old case to put it in, with adequate power supply. I added a 1 TB SATA drive (OS/2 supports up to 2 TB, apparently, and the box will hold a couple of them), and split the 320 GB drive into enough parts to install eCS 2.1 along side of WinXP (I wanted to keep that because the machine also has a TV adapter, and the software is in XP, but that is another story). Anyway, I added:
SAMBA (CIFS communication).
Peter Moylan's WEASEL e-mail server, which now includes IMAP server. I use this for testing PMMail.
Peter Moylan's FTP server.
WEB/2 web server (Just because...).
RSYNC.
PMVNC server, for remote control.
The built in OS/2 firewall, set up according to the instructions at:
http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL0203H/vnewsf2.htmSTunnel, for secure connections (I use this in front of Weasel, for testing PMMail, but it should work with any TCP/IP programs that don't have SSL type capabilities).
Then, I formatted the 1 TB drive as JFS, and started to figure out how to use it. It has worked very well, for what I need. Windows clients (XP and 7) use it, mostly through SAMBA, but the rest also work. I did play with Linux Mint Cinnamon 64 client, for a while, which also worked, but the permissions thing was a PITA. For eCS clients, I mostly use RSYNC to do nightly backups, but the rest work too.
You need to remember that this setup presents a network interface, and the internal storage devices don't mean anything to the client machines (meaning NFS means nothing). Apple Time machine is a backup tool (apparently). Of course, that won't run on my setup, but client machines should be able to use it. I am using the Seagate version of Acronis (free, but you need to have a seagate drive present, or it won't run) in windows for backups (uses SAMBA). I don't know much about Apple, but I suspect that there is an RSYNC implementation for it, and you should be able to mount a SAMBA share as a network drive for any Apple software to use (although I have heard some disparaging words about Apple, and network shares). The rest should work fine.
I suppose my setup is almost a server, but I don't use server software, and it is all OS/2 (eCS 2.1). The machine can also act as a backup machine, for my other machines, should the need arise. The cost was minimal, and the performance is excellent. The main drawback is that the case is big, and the fans are a bit noisy, but those problems are easily fixed, if I cared.
Oh yeah, it is also on my ancient Tripplite UPS, interfaced with UPSMONC through a serial port.