Adventures in Network Storage

Having gone through a bit of a pain barrier trying to set-up network storage on my network at home I thought it might be useful to document how I got on.

I like the idea of network attached storage (NAS) - having a common drive available to any Mac on the network gives a lot of flexibilty. So after looking round at some of the options I first went and bought a NetDisk from Ximeta. Now it says it works on both Mac and Windows. But that’s not strictly true. Yeah sure it takes no time to get it up and running on a Mac but the bad news is only one user can have read and write access at the same time - in fact the disk only shows up on one users machine at any time. Pretty damn useless (Windows have multi-write access). Apparently the Mac drivers for multi-write won’t be out till next year! The good thing was the interface is also USB 2.0 so I still had a drive I could use.

So next up I discovered this little Network Storage Link from Linksys. A cool little Linux device that allows you to plug in 2 USB hard drives and have them show up on the network. Now they don’t support Macs but after surfing round I found that it is indeed possible to connect it to a Mac network. So I get hold of one and configured it - and then nothing. You see what none of those websites tell you is that you have to connect using the smb protocol. This time I chose “Connect to server”, entered 192.168.1.77 and bingo there it was. Great. Well not really. You see the thing is now I needed to plug it into the Belkin router. And when I did that I could no longer get to that IP address like before. So to make it work this is what I did.

I plugged the NSLU2 back into my Mac then fired up 192.168.1.77 to get to the admin screen. On the screen where it says fixed IP I changed the default to 192.168.2.77. Then I fired up 192.168.2.77 to get the admin again. On that same screen I then entered 192.168.2.1 in the gateway field (my Belkin gateway address) and saved the settings. Reconnected back up to my router, but this time used smb://servername/sharename in the connect to server dialog (where servername is the name of the NSLU2 server you set up in the admin and sharename is the name of the share you want to connect to). And then it all works. Phew! Hope that helps someone.