OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Storage

NAS and OS/2?

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Dariusz Piatkowski:
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:
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:
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:

--- 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?

--- End quote ---

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:
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.

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