Author Topic: NAS and OS/2?  (Read 32677 times)

Dariusz Piatkowski

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NAS and OS/2?
« on: November 01, 2014, 03:37:41 pm »
OK, so my kids (10 and 12 yo) have now begun to 'run rampant' with their tablets/cameras/etc...LOL...not that I'm complaining, but I need to figure out a way to manage their media data (photos, audio, and videos). Storing it on the main OS/2 machine is really not an option...I for one do NOT give my kids the access to the OS/2 box, number of reasons. They do have their own WinXP machine, however, to simplify access to the media from devices like a TV for example I'm looking more and more at the NAS type storage.

Soo...I took a peek at: Western Digital WDBCTL0020HWT My Cloud (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1140), reviews say it's not particularly awe inspiring...however, it's a starting point. Most importantly, I do need to understand how 'workable' daily interface to/from my OS/2 machine (where bulk of the data and media applications reside today) is.

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?

Thanks!

Matt Walsh

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #1 on: November 01, 2014, 03:55:42 pm »
I've got one of the 2 TB MyCloud devices and have it plugged into my router by network cable.  It works fine on windows and my eCS2.1 boxes.  I use NetDrive on OS/2 to communicate, but I think you could use Samba.  On the Win7 boxes I use www.netdrive.com which is the same name, but different software.  You can use it free for one connection.
Matt Walsh

ivan

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #2 on: November 01, 2014, 11:36:46 pm »
At work we have a combination of D-Link DNS-320, DNS-323, DNS-343 and DNS345 NAS boxes fitted with 1TB to 4TB drives set up as RAID1.  All are accessed from our OS/2 machines using SAMBA and the built in FTP servers.  We also supply them to our OS/2 using clients.

At home I have a DNS-320, and a DNS-232, one with a 1.5TB RAID1 and the other with a 2TB RAID1.  These are used to backup my various OS/2 machines again using SAMBA and their built in FTP servers.  They are, in turn, backed up to a DNS-343 that is set up with two 3TB RAID1 arrays.

All NAS boxes have a gigabit network interface and are connected to the network gigabit switch.

In the five or so years that we have been using them we have never had a problem connecting them to OS/2 machines but there have been a few glitches with windows machines mainly because of how windows acts on the network (the windows machines were from clients, not ours).

Doug Bissett

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #3 on: November 02, 2014, 04:55:30 am »
Quote
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.htm
STunnel, 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.

Paul Smedley

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #4 on: November 02, 2014, 09:39:30 am »
It depends whether or not you need EA's on the samba share. If you do, using an 'off the shelf' NAS may not give you the customisation you need.

If you need EA support, you might be better buying something like a HP N40L or N54L Microserver, and installing Ubuntu Server on it - by installing webmin, you end up with something not hard to configure, but still have the power of a full server OS.

Sigurd Fastenrath

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #5 on: November 02, 2014, 10:06:48 am »

Alex Taylor

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #6 on: November 02, 2014, 12:22:51 pm »
I've been using a ZyXel NSA320 for over a year and a half now, it works very well.  You do need to use the included Windows software for first-time setup, but otherwise it works fine from OS/2 with EVFS/NetDrive and the Samba plugin.  I use it to run backups onto, as well as save some of my iTunes videos.  The NAS itself has no hard drives out of the box - you get a pair of SATA hard disks to put in it, and you can choose to configure them as one big volume, separate volumes, or RAID of various types.  It's small, fits easily under a desk or on a shelf, and is very quiet (a definite advantage when it lives in the bedroom!)

IIRC I submitted a detailed review to ecomstation.ru shortly after I got it, but they never bothered to post it on their site.

Eugene Gorbunoff

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #7 on: November 03, 2014, 12:02:55 am »
More reports about NAS devices: http://ecomstation.ru/hardware.php?action=category&section=disk

* yes, not all reports were published, 100 reports in the queue, it requires efforts
* ZyXel NSA320 -- http://ecomstation.ru/hardware.php?action=item&id=2205

Alex Taylor

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #8 on: November 04, 2014, 01:20:38 pm »
More reports about NAS devices: http://ecomstation.ru/hardware.php?action=category&section=disk

* yes, not all reports were published, 100 reports in the queue, it requires efforts
* ZyXel NSA320 -- http://ecomstation.ru/hardware.php?action=item&id=2205

Ah yes, there it is.  Thanks, Eugene.

mwizard

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #9 on: January 31, 2015, 01:02:28 am »
I have heard stories that the RAID versions of NAS system require matching drives to work.  So you could not use two 1T drives from two different manufacturers.  And perhaps not even a mix of WD Caviar Blue & Green, etc.  For those who have been using them, can you confirm or deny the stories I've been hearing?

It puts a damper on my enthusiasm to find out that if one of my raid drives go out, I may have a very rough time trying to find a matching replacement drive if there were such a requirement.

Paul Smedley

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #10 on: January 31, 2015, 09:58:38 am »
I have heard stories that the RAID versions of NAS system require matching drives to work.  So you could not use two 1T drives from two different manufacturers.  And perhaps not even a mix of WD Caviar Blue & Green, etc.  For those who have been using them, can you confirm or deny the stories I've been hearing?

It puts a damper on my enthusiasm to find out that if one of my raid drives go out, I may have a very rough time trying to find a matching replacement drive if there were such a requirement.

Every NAS I've seen runs linux, and use mdadm to create the array. You don't need identical drives.... http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=408461 has some details.

ivan

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #11 on: January 31, 2015, 10:12:58 am »
Mark, I can only speak from the experience of using D-Link NAS boxes but we have never found them requiring matched drives or even drives of the same capacity for use in a RAID array (make sure you know just why you want to use a RAID array and what type of array - RAID is not a backup system).

With the D-Link, if you use different size disks and RAID 1 you will get a RAID array the size of the smallest disk and a standard disk for the remainder of the space.

mwizard

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #12 on: February 03, 2015, 12:39:18 am »
Paul/Ivan

Thanks very much for sharing your experience.  In this case, I have an interest in a low power consuming NAS (gigabit & 2T useable storage) that would have RAID mirror so that if I lost a disk, I could replace the bad disk and be back up to speed without losing data.  I have offline USB drives I can use for backups.

Would prefer one that doesn't require Win to setup since I don't own one of those machines.  I've been thinking of FreeNAS but getting it into a low power consuming system didn't seem all that easy to me.  I'm able to build my own systems, but I'm not an expert.

Thanks again.

Paul Smedley

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #13 on: February 03, 2015, 06:11:28 am »
Hey Mark,

Thanks very much for sharing your experience.  In this case, I have an interest in a low power consuming NAS (gigabit & 2T useable storage) that would have RAID mirror so that if I lost a disk, I could replace the bad disk and be back up to speed without losing data.  I have offline USB drives I can use for backups.

Would prefer one that doesn't require Win to setup since I don't own one of those machines.  I've been thinking of FreeNAS but getting it into a low power consuming system didn't seem all that easy to me.  I'm able to build my own systems, but I'm not an expert.

HP Microserver N40L or N54L are reasonably priced, and reasonably low power. I run Ubuntu Server on mine. Started with a N40L and upgraded last year to a N54L.

Cheers,

Paul

ivan

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Re: NAS and OS/2?
« Reply #14 on: February 03, 2015, 01:51:16 pm »
Mark, you have two choices. 
1)  Buy a 2 or 4 bay NAS and disks and you are ready to go.

2)  Build your own which requires getting the hardware and some way of putting it all together plus setting up the software.

Adding to what I said in choice 1. All of the NAS boxes I have seen and used have a web interface that is accessed via a browser - all the win based program does is find the IP of the unit and then access the web interface. The D-Link units we use to supplement our HP storage array have a gigabit network interface and are fully configurable.  They also incorporate an FTP server and other services that we don't use.  Some date from 2006 and have been running 24/7 since then.  The one instance we had when a disk went down it was just a matter of pulling it and pushing in the replacement - the RAID 1 rebuilt itself in the background without any problem.