[ILUG] free software NASes?

[paul at clubi.ie]

Hi Colm,

On Thu, 4 Dec 2008, Colm Buckley wrote:

> Although they're in a higher market segment to what you describe, I 
> have both a Thecus 5200PRO and a LaCie 5Big RAID at home; of the 
> two, the LaCie seems to have a higher build quality and a much more 
> polished user interface, but the Thecus is much more modifiable; 
> they have a thriving community of user-supplied "modules" which can 
> add useful functionality (such as command-line access).  They both 
> run Linux.

It came down to the QNap TS-209 or Thecus N2100. Both vendors are 
reasonably friendly to community firmware mods (though, QNap seem to 
actually be trying to integrate with comunity efforts). I went for 
the Thecus N2100 in the end, because Scan had it for a better price 
(£150), and the hardware seems well specified (600MHz IOP, 128MB DDR 
RAM - expandalbe to 512MB, free mini-PCI slot, 3 USB, 2x SATA).

The Thecus firmware seems OK, if you're a windows user. Though, it 
has a tendency to not report errors very well. E.g. if installing 
modules seems to do nothing, go check that your RAID array has 
finished building - a prerequisite. If your RAID array build has 
finished and says "Healthy", go check whether the size of the array 
is "N/A" - apparently the rebuild can appear to finish successfully 
when it hasn't finished unsuccessfully. ;) So there's some quirks in 
the less frequently used parts of the UI.

Unfortunately the SSH and NFS modules available for the vendor 
firmware are a bit sucky:

- The 3rd party SSH module does some weird thing where it remaps the
   UIDs in SCP access, so the files look like they're owned by you via
   SCP, but are actually owned by root when you SSH in.

   This seems to be something to do with a chroot-jail patch that was
   added.

- The 3rd party NFS module also manages to fail at remapping UIDs
   correctly (and doesn't support NFSv4).

   Unfortunately, though the web-UI writes out a /etc/exports file,
   it doesn't read it. Nor is it what is used to configure NFS on
   boot. So customising it via the CLI is relatively useless.

   Further, even if I'd gotten it to work, I suspect it would have
   been hard to make work nicely together with the mad SCP access.

OpenWRT unfortunately don't supply Intel IOP images at the moment, so 
I ended up installing Debian Lenny on the Thecus. A lot more 
tinkering to get it set up, but far more flexible to my needs.

Thanks Colm!

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
Too much radiation coming from the soil.